A determined runner completed the final 10 miles of a marathon with a BROKEN leg – and said ‘runner’s high’ kept him going.
Mike Lewis-Copeland, 39, felt a twinge at mile 16 but continued running for an hour and a half with a fractured fibula.
It was only after a cautionary trip to minor injuries the dad-of-two was told he had fractured his fibula.
With only seven of the 13 races he had planned to run this season completed, Mike accepts he might have to put off competing again until next year.
The keen runner, from Kelty in Fife, said: “I am recovering slowly but surely.
“I massively surprised myself.
“I have had broken bones before but when I felt the pain, I didn’t know that’s what it was.
“I have torn ligaments before too, but it didn’t feel like that, I thought it was maybe tendon damage.
“You just assume if you have a broken bone you wouldn’t be able to run on it.
“It must have been runners high that kept me going.
“I went to the first aiders at the finish line and they thought it was soft tissue damage, so they gave me a couple of ibuprofen and sent me on my way.
“I went home and left it that day but the following day my daughter had a routine eye appointment at the hospital so I decided to go into minor injuries to have it checked.”
After suffering a minor muscular injury during the London Marathon in April, Mike knew it would be harder to stop and start again so just “grizzed it out”.
He said: “The nurse asked me if I’d fallen in a pothole or if there had been an impact but nothing had happened,” Mike explained.
“Obviously I didn’t thing it was a fracture. I just kept focussing on finishing it, and would worry about the pain after it.
“I had been joking on the train over how stupid it would be to keep going with a break and now here I am. I thought it was maybe a tendon but had no idea I had fractured it.
“It did get to the stage that I was limping a lot and at times having to drag my leg but I just kept counting down the miles.
“I was like Dory singing ‘just keep swimming’ in the Finding Nemo film. I kept saying to myself ‘just keep running, just keep running’.
“I was thinking that I only had 10 miles to go, then 9 miles, then 8 miles and I counted all the way down knowing that after I had crossed the finish line I could sit down and deal with the problem.”
No-one knows how Mike broke his fibula on May 26 but medics have put it down to beginning as a possible stress fracture.
But with months of rehabilitation ahead of him is focussing on the silver lining.
He said: “Next year I will be going again – I’m really lucky because the bones are in perfect alignment, it could have been a lot worse.”