The Shakespeare Half Marathon

Early next year I intend to post a review of the '2014 Half Marathon A Month' challenge that Chris and I had set ourselves. However, yesterday we completed race number 11 of the challenge, which was the Shakespeare Half Marathon in Stratford upon Avon (SuA). There were quite a few highlights so I thought it was worth a wee post on its own.

We travelled down to SuA on Friday 14th Nov and I wasn't overly alarmed when Chris suggested we should meet in the bar at the station at 11.30am(!)  (I'm going to use the euphemism 'training' to describe many of our activities during and after the trip to SuA)

We left Glasgow Central for Birmingham New Street Station at 12pm on the first part of the journey. In the preceding 30 minutes we had managed to commence our training (2 repetitions) in the bar at the station. Good start.

As we settled ourselves in for the journey south, Chris disclosed that he had packed some more training aids for the trip. The year 1664 seemed to be involved in some way. When those training sessions were completed, we managed to purchase more from the buffet car. Thankfully a rest from training was taken when we were on the packed commuter journey from Birmingham Moor Street to SuA.

On arrival, we quickly checked into our accommodation and headed out for more training at a local restaurant, and subsequently at a place called the Queen's Head, where we watched the Scotland v Ireland game. Finally got to sleep at 11pm. Trained as a newt.

Race day duly arrived and when I awoke I knew instantly that I was in a sub-optimal condition due to over training the previous day. However, a huge, high quality B&B breakfast was munched and we headed along to Long Marston Airfield.

There were four race events on the day. 5k, 10k, Half Marathon, and Marathon. They all started at the same time, which was 10am! The course was set around one 5k lap of the airfield, which you multiplied up depending on the event you were running. None of that different coloured race numbers stuff. It was up to you to count the laps that applied to your event.

At most races you get a bit info about the route, but this one had to be the most esoteric yet. The laps of the airfield are exactly 5k, which is great for two of the events, but of course the half marathon and marathon need additional distances appended to them, and this meant that runners in those events got special briefings. The half marathon briefing involved reference to green bean bags for the lap, and blue bean bags for the finish. It's fair to say that almost no-one understood these convoluted instructions, but the final moments of the half marathon seemed to go without incident, despite the interchanging across bean bags of runners going at different paces!

Also part of the briefing was the news that Long Marston is still a functioning airfield, although it is very rarely used. We were told that if a plane attempted a landing during the race then we would be informed what action to take. Very reassuring!

Part of the runway is also used these days for Drag Racing. This meant that about 1km of it has a thick layer of black rubber. I overheard someone say that if you ran on the rubber it was sticky and would slow you down. I followed this advice and kept to the non rubbery bits, and in hindsight I probably added about 300 metres to my distance as a result (as confirmed by my sports watch). I also now think that, instead of being sticky, a thin film of water on the rubber actually supplied an aqua planing effect to those who ran on it, so that they actually skated for a kilometre :)

After the briefing we headed to the start line via the usual trip to the loos, and we were both raring to go at that point. 

When the race started Chris, as usual, sprinted off into the distance. Usually I either catch up with him at some point or I don't see him again until he's already got his medal and eating a banana. At the risk of giving too much away on who finished first, here's a photo of me taken by Chris when I won the musical statues competition at the event.

Of course this was a race that included four laps, so I was able to gauge exactly how I was doing in comparison to Chris. It became apparent after about 10k that I was going to get nowhere near him! In the end, not only did Chris finish before me, he also ran a Personal Best of 01:55:26 despite all the 'training' we had done! As you can see from his lap split times he actually ran the the 16-20k lap faster than the previous one. Some performance.

Alas, I didn't benefit as much as Chris from the training. I started out at a pace that would have got me a time of 01:56:00 and got slower with each kilometre that passed. For a while I tried to keep going at a pace that would bring me in under 2 hours, but eventually I realised that I wasn't even going to manage that, and was just happy to coast in with the less impressive time of 02:03.57.

The moral of this story, boys and girls, is don't overtrain prior to race day. (Unless you're Chris).