While the Kenyan and other leading African athletes had a private flight laid on for them at a reported cost of £120,000 ($184,000) by event organisers earlier this week to get them to London, Yamauchi only arrived in the capital on Wednesday night after a six-day journey from her training base in New Mexico which started with a journey to Denver airport.

"It’s worth remembering that we have hindsight," Bedford responded.

"On Wednesday evening between nine and ten o’clock when we were told we were going to start to go back to normal, Mara at that stage was in Paris.

"The alternative would have been for her to have sat around on her arse and done nothing and still been in Denver.

"It’s very easy with hindsight to say, ‘Why didn’t you just take it easy and hope things went right?’ 

"I think the message here is that Mara wasn’t happy with that and wanted to give herself every single chance of being in London."

While the defending women’s champion, Irina Mikitenko of Germany, had a relatively straightforward time getting to London by rail via Brussels, Yamauchi and her Japanese husband, Shigetoshi, were involved in flights from Albuquerque to Denver and from New Jersey to Lisbon, then a six-hour taxi journey to Madrid, a two-day drive to Paris, and another taxi ride to Le Touquet airport where race organisers had hired a private Piston propeller plane to fly them to Shoreham.

"We didn’t have to do it that way," Yamauchi said.

"It was our choice.

"We flew to Denver last Thursday night and said let’s see what happens with the ash cloud, but it was clear it was getting worse.

"So we thought either we just sit here in Denver and hope for the best  and hope that planes are flying again before next Sunday, or we try to make our own journey.

"It was getting a lot worse at that point.

"We thought - 'It’s not going to happen."

"Even if the airports do open again at that time the flights are going to be full.

"We’re not even in Europe, we have to fly across the Atlantic.

"So we booked on a flight from Denver to Shannon but that got cancelled by the ash cloud.

'The thought of just sitting back and letting Dave Bedford get us to London never crossed our minds.

"We just thought, ‘We’ve got to get there‘.

"We had an open ticket, which was very helpful for flexibility on flights."

Yamauchi described the whole experience as "a mental rollercoaster",  adding: "We didn’t have much time to sleep, and I had no time to train.

"We didn’t have times for meals - we were just grabbing sandwiches all the time.

"Physically it was quite tiring, mentally it was also quite wearing sorting out the journey, wondering whether we were going to get there or not.

"On the positive side I wasn’t really worrying about the race.

"When you are tapering for a marathon you have more energy to think about things and it’s easy to worry too much about the race.

"But I haven’t really thought about the race at all!"

Yamauchi, an Oxford University graduate who previously worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Service in Japan, said there had been numerous memorable moments in the course of her most recent journey.

"When we arrived at Lisbon we thought, ‘Fine, we’re in Europe, let’s try and find a plane or a train to Madrid.’

"But you couldn’t find information anywhere.

"So Shige said Lets get a taxi!’

"And I thought ‘Hang on, this is going to cost quite a lot of money...’

"But he said: ‘Never mind, we’ve got to get to the London marathon.

"'Dave Bedford will pay.

"'Let’s go!'

"So we got in the taxi and the taxi driver said ‘I’m so happy you are in my taxi!

"'I’m going to earn a week wages because of you, and my uncle lives in Madrid so I’m going to have a great time.’

"Our taxi driver from Paris to Le Touquet was a Cambodian man in his ‘60s.

"I was stressing about getting to the airport on time for most of the journey and then i thought at the end, ‘Hang on, this man is Cambodian, and in his sixties.’

"So I said to him, ‘When did you leave Cambodia?’

"And he said: ‘Oh, way back, and I lost all my family, my wife and  all my children in the war.’

"That kind of put life’s ups and downs in perspective.

"Being at the Gare du Nord station in Paris was the lowest point.

"We tried to get information about travel, tried to get a hotel, and everybody was [French accent, hand gestures] ‘I don’t know,..you go ask over there.."

"I was expressing my frustration to Shige and he said: ‘Oh, it’s just because you’re English.

"'They’re being quite helpful to me.’

"That was supposed to be calming me down!

"It just wound me up even more. I did lose my sanity in the Gare du Nord station...

"If I run well on Sunday it could be fantastic, it would be the icing on the cake.

"But I’ve never prepared for a race like this before, in terms of the journey and the training I haven’t done.

"So I just have to try and optimise my preparations between now and Sunday.

"I need to rest as much as possible.

"The last four nights apart from last night we’ve probably had about four-five hours sleep so I need to have some sleep and do a bit or running to get the muscles moving again."

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]


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April 2010: London Marathon field set to be unaffected by air chaos says Bedford
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April 2009: Mara Yamauchi - If I keep improving I can win a medal at London 2012
June 2008: Yamauchi praises proposed London 2012 marathon course