The marathon

For the past 1,5 weeks I've been extremely busy with all the stuff related to the marathon. But by now.... most of it is over!
Yes,we did it! So I'm gonna tell how it went, because it was so great!

Firstly, we had a very early start from the village- started driving there already at 8. I hadn't slept properly for couple of nights before the marathon so I was a bit tired. We loaded the bikes into the vans and took off. The weather seemed to be perfect on that day which made us a lot happier. As we got to Otepää, it took us a little bit of time to find a parking place, but we managed to get a quite good spot not too far from the starting point. So we unloaded our bikes, changed our clothes and got all ready and went to the starting point where some more of us were waiting. We chatted and laughed a bit nervously, we were all exited. Took some pictures as well. Then came the time to go to our starting point. We passed the gates and started counting the minutes 'til start. 5,4,3,2,1 minute. 30 seconds, 10 seconds, 5 seconds, and the pistol shot and the theme song of the marathon. Off we went! I love the theme song of the marathon- it's really inspiring and makes me feel proud I'm participating. It feels so great to be part of thousands of cyclists who just take off to a long journey of 89km. There was mud, a lot. Sometimes we had to cross hill with the angle of 60 degrees, completely covered with mud so we went 2 steps up, 1 slide down. We had to push our bike through long mud ponds, we had to push it up some harder hills. I had to wash my bike once because I didn't stay up with it any more- it was just covered with mud so much. After we had cycled about half of the distance, the village leader - Ly was in the food point with one of my co-workers and the ihhabitants to cheer us. It felt so good. I struggled with tears after we had passed that point because it felt so good that our leaders care about such event so much. I felt so proud. Then came the part which was again really muddy. That made me wanna cry because it seemed to be endless... Then, after cycling about 60km, I felt I really needed some glycose- I was waiting for the food point to get some raisins and bananas. Ahhh, after getting some of those, me and Marge (one of my team-mates and co-workers) went on to get to the food point where we were supposed to meet the inhabitants. As we got there, everybody were already cheering on us. At this point we had a bit more than 10km lef to go. We ate a bit more and then took off with the inhabitants. The last 10km were extremely easy as our speed wasn't that fast any more and we were laughing our heads off because Taavi was wishing everybody (even random cyclists that went past us) lots of love and was just really funny. Then, right before the finish line, we all gathered together (some more people from our team had managed to catch us so we had almost the whole team together) to cross the finish line together. Some people told, including my family, that we were shown in the TV when we finished. It felt unbelievably good to cross that final line. It was like exceeding yourself...Right after getting our medals, we had a picture taken of us and then Lõunaleht (one South-Estonian) newspaper took an interview from me about the marathon and our tiny project. After that we got big chocolates from our leader, got out diplomas from the race centre and had ate some good soup. And then we went home, all really happy, a bit tired, but proud of ourselves.
And after the marathon, I've given some more interviews (I think about 4 altogether) and we've managed to raise 145 euros (last checked on Monday).
It's great that it's over. Maybe we'll do it again next year. At least my team-mates were enthusiastic about it!

Great experience for all of us!