I’ve had my fair share of niggles and ‘injuries’ over the years, all the way from the allergic reaction to sticky tape which gave me an elephant-man foot to the strained Achilles tendon from running 250km in 6 days to the usual broken toe here and there.

And all the way to the damaged knee which has basically kept me from running properly for the best part of 18 months. One way or another, most of these injuries could somewhat be related to at least doing some sort of physical effort (even though the buggered knee wasn’t really).

So, on that basis, pulling/ tearing/ shredding / exploding / god-knows-what-ing the tendon on the upper-part of my foot while WALKING was both unexpected, unwelcomed and downright painful. Again, I was walking. Slowly. On a flat surface. Yet, somehow, 9 out of 10 pain and, to cut a long story short, x-ray: good, ultrasound: good, physio: “did you ever have tuberculosis, I’ve no idea what this is or how you’ve done it” and, a month later, here we are in Malta.

It’s quite common to taper for a half-marathon or marathon. Thanks to this ageing body, I took this to quite the extreme: in one month, I had run 8 (eight) kilometres. And swam like 30 minutes. Which, obviously, in addition to sitting at a desk all day had me in tip-top shape for the Malta Half Marathon.

We’d signed up to the race a few months earlier when, it seemed, I had got over one of the million bugs I’ve been having this winter and was finally starting to get some mileage under my belt again. Well, I was wrong. Anyway.

The oddest thing about this injury was that I could seem perfectly better (0/10 pain) then, as I once did go for a short jog (4 and a half of those 8 km!) and bang, 9,5/10 pain and I had to walk home in my socks on one foot. Strange as hell.

This said, we’d been in Malta for a few days and had done a lot of walking and I was still at 0/10 pain. Could I really be that stupid as to decide to run this race on absolutely zero training? Of course, yes. I did, however, have a modicum of self-awareness (or ego…) left and decided that, if I were to run, I would “look” like a middle of the pack runner and not a club runner. Gone were the Vaporflys and club vest I had packed, in were the non-descript running tshirt and my everyday (almost literally) trainers I’ve warn for the last 5 years.

While the choice of shoes were, on the one hand, utterly stupid in terms of performance and softness, they were also deliberate: after 5 years, they fit my feet like a glove and they are really loose on the top (which is the bit which rubbed/was injured).

So, at 5.30am, here I was, in our rented apartment room, creeping around trying not to wake the baby in order to put on my low-performance outfit and jog (my first kilometre in two weeks!) to the bus to catch the shuttle out to Mdina. First test passed with success. 21 more to go!

The Half Marathon follows an interesting course and, if in good shape, could actually be a very good course to get a PB. I’m not sure it’d be an official PB as there’s approximately 200m of elevation loss between the start and the finish, but hey, only philistines will bicker, your family members never need to know.

The course starts in the beautiful, old, fortified city of Mdina and then, essentially, heads straight across the island towards Valetta, the capital city. It’s not far from actually being across the island because Malta is really very tiny. Very pretty, but very tiny! It’s a nice place to come for a long weekend (or a long week if you’re a big fan of churches or the Crusades) and most Brits would feel quite at home, other than the unfamiliar nice weather: cars drive on the left, most high-street shops are British in origin and, of course, there are a lot of pasty and, erm, British-sized tourists around.

Back to the race. It’s now 7am and I’m walking around Mdina’s inside walls utterly freezing my balls off. In my lackadaisical approach to planning, I had really gone bare minimums and hadn’t really remembered the concept of bag drop so didn’t take any spare kit. And the top of a windy hill in February at 7am on a Sunday morning, even if it is Malta, is nippy to say the least. And I was certainly not going to run to warm up and risk injury. So I stood around, walked around learning about Phoenician and Arabic settlers and, all, in all, being remarkably cultured for such an ungodly time on a Sunday. I’m sure thousands of runners in bright lycra shorts using the high walls as windbreaks is exactly what they pictured their legacy as being.

On a personal perspective, it was also interesting being this town as it’s where my Mum’s Dad spent his national service helping rebuild post-war Europe or, as she puts it “cycled round, looked at things, bought goods to send home, worked…”. I bet his colleagues and him never did anything as hard as run a half marathon off no training, that’s for sure.

Anyway, back to the race, take 2. The gun went off, and so did we. As I was doing this a little blindly in an “if I can only do 5km, they have Ubers in Malta anyway, I’ll somehow find my way back” mode, I didn’t go to the front and went about 10 rows back, thinking that should have been a decently paced group. It was not. They were SLOW. Shove, push, nudge, grab (my phone which had slipped out of my pocket, ugh) and, after about 500m, I could finally settle in a 4’20/km ish pace which was definitely a bit faster than planned, but also about right considering the downhill slope (which basically lasted the first 7 or 8 km).

The route itself, well, it certainly starts in the most scenic part of the course. The countryside is, mostly pretty picturesque but, like in any road race, a lot of the race takes part of backroads or major roads where the main focus is the quality of the underfoot than necessarily the view!

Overall however, my weird tendon issue seemed … fine. Totally fine. Oddly totally fine. What, however, wasn’t fine was my cardio. We were running with a wind behind us  (oh yeah, that helped the pace too) which is great but also means that, running eastwards into the rising sun on tarmac, well, it was actually getting pretty hot. And I was very much not in shape. I got to 10km in around 44 minutes I think and took my first mini break, just to get my heart rate back down then basically did a routine of 3km on, 200m recovery just to get me to the end.

The course had a lot of volunteers out all along the course, handing water out of cheering you along. Being more and more involved in organising races, I definitely appreciate their efforts more and more so big thumbs up to all the kids and adults out that day (I think from the scouts, or similar looking).

Around 14km, I really hit the wall (which, while I’m in no means embarrassed about it, I’d done zero training in a month) really felt quite incredible considering how pedestrian this pace and distance would have been for me not that long ago.

Around 15km, we were now running down one lane of a motorway, with the rest of it still in action, which was a bit unusual. A car actually knocked one of the cones over as it drove past me which wasn’t an issue, but it probably wasn’t the safest of setups.

Around 17km, my amazing shoes were, indeed, still amazingly loose so the tendon was good. But their looseness and total lack of support mean that, in one swooping oozy second, I suddenly felt not one, not two but three blisters appear and pop in one go. Which was lovely. Cue some slightly hesitant running for a little bit but, in the grand scheme of things, I knew this was a manageable issue so didn’t care too much.

By this point, we were in Valetta. We just needed to squiggle around the harbour past a few irate drivers, some normal sized humans and some very pocket-sized humans and I crossed the line.

The time, 1h44, was entirely anecdotal. However, I got to the end. My feet may have been covered in blisters, I may have felt like passing out of exhaustion, I may have felt like I’d run an ultramarathon for the next few days BUT I got to the end so it’s a medal I’ll appreciate when I look back at my medal collection in 50 years’ time!

Time: 1h44’00 (393/1,689)

Speed

Scenery

Difficulty

Pain