'Slow motion' runner finishes marathon a week late

[janbo1960]

'Slow motion' marathon runner Greg Billingham has finished the London Marathon one week after the event started.

Thirty-nine-year-old Billingham decided to "run" the 42-kilometre event at an ultra-slow pace of 4.8 kilometres every 10 hours, to raise money for the charity Children with Leukaemia.

He said he ran in slow motion because people who become ill often find their lives slowed down.

Billingham, who had never run a marathon before, hopes to have raised between 30,000 and 40,000 pounds for the charity.

"At first people look at you strangely... People weren't too sure whether it was a joke," he said.

He said when people waved at him "I would look at them in slow motion".

Billingham developed his technique of lifting each leg in the air for several seconds at a time during his training, which involved moving very slowly on a treadmill and running slowly in a farmer's field "where nobody could see me".

"When I turned up in London, I had a tenner (a 10 pound note) and a sleeping bag," the building developer said.

"The more I did, the better I was getting at it. The word got around London."

Billingham says he is "still adapting" to his success.