The last of my four days off and I was up 15 minutes earlier than a normal workday, 5.45am, It aint half dark that time in the morning. Shovelled some porridge down my neck and a quick cup of coffee and out the door for 6.30ish aided by my (almost) trusted sat nav. It only took an hour and a half of boring motorway to get there for 8ish and I was surprised at the amount of people already there. Parking was a good mile away from the start and my immediate thought was 'it's gonna be a long hobble back'.

The weather was perfect for the run, cool, dry and virtually windless and at 8.50ish we were on the track, I was up near the front or as close as I dared, from the chatting that was going on I was in a 3.15ish group. 9am, Horn goes off and I left em for dead, gotta stop this charging off at the start, by about two miles they had all caught me up and I just tucked in behind the them.

I always find that marathons are the friendliest races, you can still have conversations as your running along, I've never heard of so many injuries being carried by various runners, all I could chip in with was my bit of a sore throat, got no sympathy for that one, after all it wasn't a running injury so apparently it didn't count!

The course is a sort of figure of eight, you run half of the top bit, then twice round the bottom bit, then back up for the other half of the top bit. As with the Wolverhampton marathon they had thrown in a loop round the local business estate, probably just to get the distance right. Plenty of local support with a 'Fetchpoint' giving out jelly babies and and various sweeties but it still didn't seem right to grab a opal fruit from one of the youngsters lining the route, I was half expecting her to burst into tears and send her dad running after me!

Everything was going to plan till about mile 16 when I seemed to have a bit of a wobble, legs were feeling a bit heavy and I definitely was out of my 'comfort zone' but then I seemed to settle down again and plodded on, trying to hang on to the runners in front and counting down the miles. The second lap seemed to go much quicker than the first lap but that was definitely in my mind as the Garmin confirmed later.

The 26 mile point is just as you go on to the track to finish with a three quarter lap clockwise, the clock read 3:21:12 as I finished (I think), forgot to stop my watch again doh, so will have to wait for the official results, a definite pb though. Not impressed with the goody bag, a Mars bar. Bottle of water, 3 sachets of hydration stuff and a banana, not a patch on Bournville Harriers goody bags! At least the course was flat as promised so I think I may be back next year!

Terry

Race website here. Results here

Pos.	No.	Gun time	Name	Gender Pos	Cat	Cat Pos.	Chip time	Chip Pos.
173	612	03:21:09	Terry Doherty	164	MV50	18	03:21:02	173