Cheltenham's Half Marathon - 27th September 2016

Cheltenham's Half Marathon - 27th September 2016

Following closely on the heels of the Scottish Half Marathon on 20th September, this was to be the second of three half marathons I was to run on consecutive weekends.

Of course as Chris and I had already run Month #33 of the Half Marathon a Month Challenge the previous weekend, this was a 'bonus'. In fact I wasn't even in Cheltenham specifically for this event. As a family we had already arranged some time previously to visit our good friends Catherine, David and their kids who live in Cheltenham, and it just so happened that the Half M was on that same weekend. It was too good an opportunity to miss.

We arrived in Cheltenham on the Friday afternoon and had a good laugh catching up with our friends. We also enjoy running a parkrun on a Saturday morning and conveniently (but not surprisingly) there is a Cheltenham version, which allowed us to do some parkrun tourism. Four of us gave it a go. Monty, Scarlett, Antonia and me, who are pictured below after a good morning's run around the Cheltenham parkrun course.

The rest of Saturday was spent doing stuff in and around Cheltenham but by Sunday morning I was still in reasonable enough shape to get up early and get ready to run. David kindly gave me a lift to the start line at Cheltenham Race Course, and in hindsight his local knowledge proved to be very important as due to road closures and other issues I found out that many runners didn't make it to the event on time. This was a bone of much contention on social media in the days following the run.

Soon after arriving I spotted that this event was one with pacers. This is always a welcome addition to any running event. Even if you don't actually follow one of them to achieve a particular time, knowing that you are between two pacers means you can gauge your general performance. Given my 2:18 time the previous weekend, and the fact that it was only a week ago that I ran a half marathon, I decided I would be happy just keeping in front of this guy.

From the very start of the race there was a decent number of onlookers cheering the runners on, and this continued for most of 13.1 miles. Up until a recent event Chris and I ran at Freckleton (future blog) I would say that this was the one that had the most direct and indirect support from folk who had turned up to watch runners in action. (Glasgow is pretty good too).

Having run the 2016 Perth Half Marathon (Kilt Run) in a kilt without incident I decided to give it another go for this event. As you can imagine it got me extra attention from the watching crowds, including the wee boy who I heard say 'Mummy, why is that man wearing a skirt?".  I wasn't the only kilted participant. About halfway along the route a guy passed me wearing not only a kilt (in Royal Stuart tartan) but also a matching 'see you Jimmy' bunnet. It was a fairly warm day so he must have been melting.

Because it was quite warm the organisers had set up some devices en route that sprayed you with water. These were very similar to those used during the marathon at the Rio Olympics and, like those in Rio, their effectiveness was dependent on how they were positioned relative to the wind. Unfortunately a couple of them ended up spraying water in the opposite direction of the running but most of them did actually do their job.

An attractive feature of this event is that you run the final couple of kilometres around Cheltenham racecourse. Or 'following in the hoofsteps of Arkle' as my horserace following cousin Gerry said to me.

On the way around the racecourse the organisers had placed musicians in a couple of places for a bit of morale boosting support in the final stages. These included the Nailsworth Silver Band, who were excellent.

At the finish I was delighted to see Clare, Antonia and Scarlett who, along with David were there encourage me in my final strides towards the finish line. Soon after we got some excellent pictures in the environs of the racecourse.

Overall it was a fantastic weekend, and it was nice to get another half marathon under my belt, albeit separately from HMAMC.


Result:   02:20:33