Niagara-on-the-Lake senior Margot Devlin added her sixth London Marathon to her medal collection on Sunday, racing through the streets of the British capital in the middle of a spring heat wave.

Devlin, competing in the 65 to 69 age group, finished the gruelling 42-kilometre race in a respectable 6:51:33 — a few hours behind the elite racers, but keeping up with them is never her goal.

Slow and steady is her motto and in 22 Celsius heat, with no breeze, her strategy was the right one.

“It was brutal,” she told The Lake Report. “It was hard on a lot of the participants and the medics and ambulances were very busy with heatstroke victims.”

Marathon organizers were so worried about the heat that they sent out repeated emails with advice about running in the heat and to not waste water at the water stations, she added.

“They thought they might run out,” but fortunately they didn’t.

Runners were cautioned to take it slow and not try to set a personal best mark.

“No worries here, I am slow.”

Sprinklers and hoses were set up outside fire departments along the route for runners to run through and ice packs were handed out.

Running in such heat “was quite an adjustment when I had been training in minus-10 weather,” Devlin said.

She noted her husband Shaun put in 20,000 steps meeting her at the 11-, 16- and 21-mile marks and then at the finish.

With a huge turnout, London now is in the Guinness Book of Records for the largest marathon in the world as 56,000 runners participated, she said.

“Getting 56,000 people and their respective supporters home is really something. The Tube was jammed.”

“There were lots of people in crazy costumes who must have really felt the heat — Big Ben, 10 fellows dressed as test tubes running in a container, a teddy bear, four knights, a rhino, a rooster” among them.

Sunday’s race came two weeks after she completed her first Paris Marathon. All told, she has now finished an impressive 20 marathons over the years, including a dozen in New York.

And she’s already signed up to return to London next year to race again.