2:30am Sunday morning in Singapore and I am creeping round my dorm room scooping up all my marathon related paraphernalia and hope there’s no one around the common area – I look like a total weirdo dressed to run at this time of the night, pouring boiling water into my ready-made porridge. The whole situation seems absurd. Due to a lack of any kind of utensil I find myself stirring my breakfast with the hostel’s business card, which promptly melts. Drunk people start to appear… I explain the spoon predicament to an English lad I met a couple of evenings previous: “Christ. You are under-prepared!”. Yep I fear the marathon is going to find me out.

4:45am and I stand in quiet and nervous anticipation with 12,000 others. I strike up conversation with a Singaporean man next to me who quickly proclaims “you should be at the front!” when he finds out i am from Scotland and have come here just to run the marathon. I quickly set him straight that I’m not fast at all just in case he thinks I’m an Ethiopian in disguise. It is pretty dark after all.

As the hooter goes off, it’s all very civilised… no pushing to the front and no whooping and shouting from the runners despite the best efforts of the upbeat commentator. I quickly realise that this is going to be a silent, polite run and even the cheerers at the designated “Cheer Stations” with their generic “you can do it!” shouts fails to raise much excitement. I wonder if they’ve been paid to appear here at 5 o’clock on a Sunday morning. I however do feel excited! I whoop at one point and feel rather self-conscious when no one else joins me in my enthusiasm for running 42km in the dark.

Initially the 25 degree heat and 93% humidity are just about bearable: the first 15km pass easily enough – the course is stunning – starting on Singapore’s premier shopping street, lit by all manner of tasteful, expensive Christmas lights, up through the district of 70 storey skyscrapers and past a couple of the world’s most expensive buildings towards the port. Sunrise over the bay is stunning, but reveals a worrying great ball of orange … the heat steadily rises and I keep on pace until I hit 30km… then I hit the wall.

As the temperature rises with the sun I find myself desperately pouring more and more water over my head… it makes me feel professional if nothing else. A highlight of this painful final 10km was a man who had two massive sponges and a bucket of iced water. I stagger towards him with my head down as he holds out his delightfully cold spongy hands to me. Not quite so professional.

As the kilometre markers tick increasingly slowly up to 42km, I hear myself swearing out loud. I get angry about the heat – whose preposterous idea was this? This marathon, this timing, this route with no shade? As I run the last few hundred metres  I pass the finish line in a blaze of irrational anger – where’s the freaking shade? Who designed this finish and why is the torture continuing? I get over it pretty quickly though when I collect my shiny new medal! A medal and a towel. What more could I ask for. Except for a banana. I would have loved a banana but they were stuck in a traffic jam apparently.

The result? 4h 43 mins and I’m delighted to see that I ranked 203 out of 1,729 females, and 1,653 out of 10,659 overall (before you men ask!). So all worth it in the end!