The next section of the course continues with quite a few short hills. The course goes through the forest for the most part and is soft and easy on the feet. It was a dry track with not many rocks or roots to trip on.
The rest stop at 56 km is where I started to get cold. I took a 5 minute break to get some hot soup, put on my jacket, cap and head light as it was starting to get dark by then.
The final rest stop overlooks Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. When you get there you know you’ll be able to finish the race. There are only 12 km left and almost all is down hill or flat. There was still the climb up the Eiffel tower but I was counting on adrenline to pull me thru there. Running along the Seine didn’t seem so long this time for some reason. I was running along with one or two others and we kept each other going.
At the foot of the Eiffel tower there was a big crowd. To go in you actually have to put your backpack through a scanner. For sure, I didn’t run up the steps, but going up was less difficult than I thought it would be. At the top I crossed the finish in 10 hours and 27 minutes, bettering my time from 2014 by 18 minutes. I finished 142 out of 343 in my category and 934 out of 2400 overall. So I was very happy with that.
It was very windy up there (here’s the video) so I quickly grabbed my medal, my finisher t-shirt and took the elevator back down to meet Gaby.