Post categories: Athletics, Olympics

Tom Fordyce|08:31 UK time, Friday, 23 April 2010

A flight from Albuquerque to Denver. A long wait. Another flight to New Jersey, another to Lisbon. Six-hour taxi ride to Madrid, two-day drive in a hire car to Paris, an endless queue at the Gare du Nord. Emergency hotel. Taxi to Le Touquet, specially-chartered prop plane across the Channel to Shoreham and finally a private car to London, just in time for Sunday's marathon.

Starring in your own special version of Planes, Trains and Automobiles is not the ideal preparation for running 26.2 miles. Not even Paula had to deal with the aftermath of an erupting Icelandic volcano. But Mara Yamauchi was doing her best to look for silver linings in the ash cloud that almost ended her marathon hopes.

"There were times when I thought we wouldn't make it," she admitted, appearing simultaneously weary and delighted to be within touching distance of Tower Bridge. "And there were times when I thought I'd be the only one to make it, and I'd win by 10 minutes."

Six days on the road can do strange things to anyone's well-being, let alone an elite athlete for whom the right combination of taper-week training, rest and low-fat carbs is an absolute essential.

"Being at Gare du Nord train station in Paris, when we were trying to get a room in a hotel or a train, and nobody could help us, was the low point," she admitted. "I did lose grip on my senses, especially having to pay one euro to use the toilet after queuing up for half an hour.

"Physically it was pretty exhausting. We've been on flights and in cars almost continuously since Sunday evening. For the last four nights we've had four or five hours sleep, so I need to get as much rest as possible."

Yamauchi, fortunately, is not the type of athlete to throw a star-shaped wobbly. Her own globe-trotting journey from club runner to the world-class elite, one of the more unusual stories in sport, has given her a very different perspective on such travails.

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