Mrs Walford – who was running in memory of her friend Mark Fallaize – and her friend Laura Coleman-Day from Lincoln – whose husband Xander died from graft vs host disease after having a stem cell transplant for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia – challenged themselves to seven marathons in a week to raise money for Anthony Nolan, starting with the Sure Guernsey Marathon and ending eight days later in London.
Mrs Coleman-Day had to stop running after their fifth marathon due to injury, but Mrs Walford completed all seven.
‘It was a really, really good week, but so tough, really tough,’ she said yesterday.
‘Unfortunately, Laura had to pull out after number five because she was injured. So I carried on on the Saturday and the Sunday, obviously finishing with London. The idea was to run from Stevenage as close down to London as we could, and we started, and that was the plan.
'Then not even two miles in, Laura was quite distressed and in quite a lot of pain, so we decided to call it a day and get an Uber straight down to London because we already had a hotel here for Sunday and help her out.
'Then I had to then gear myself up to then go out running around London because I still had 26.2 miles to tick off.’
Mrs Walford said completing the London Marathon was ‘super emotional’.
‘I’m still a bit in shock and I’m sure in the next couple of days it’s all going to sink in, but when people say you’ve just done seven marathons in eight days, I’m kind of like, have I? Did it actually happen?’ she said.
‘It was such an amazing week, such an amazing opportunity really.’
The duo smashed their fundraising target of £7,777 over the weekend.
‘It’s just literally gone through the roof.
‘Originally I think our target was something like £4,000 and then we went over that, and somebody said, oh, you should have your target at £7,777 to kind of match your challenge. We never thought we would get that far,’ said Mrs Walford.
‘It’s just mind-blowing.’