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Portsmouth coastal marathon

27/12/2014

This was my third Portsmouth Marathon, and I ran it with my brother Dan in what is becoming a bit of a family tradition. This year we ran the whole thing together, both aiming for a nice easy 4 hours or so, since we were both doing the Liverbird Double a week and a bit after, and I had the Orrell OMG in between.

The start was a bit different this year due to some work going on near the pier, so we were led up half a mile or so to the start en masse. It was so busy and we were so far back we didn’t hear any actual start, we just crossed some timing mats and were off.

There were obviously a lot more people than there had been in previous years, possibly due to better weather meaning fewer non-starters, but it was a bit messy as a result. There were a few bits where we had to stop and wait, especially at the kissing gate about 10 miles in where we were queueing for a few minutes and in danger of being in the way of the leaders coming back.

We weren’t especially arsed about it as we weren’t running for a time or places, but it would have been really annoying if we had.

The rest of the race was pretty uneventful, just nattering and plodding along. We were diverted away from the final beach crossing as the tide was in which took us through some pretty uninspiring residential areas, but apart from that the route was fine and in pretty good condition compared to previous years.

We had a bit left for a final push and crossed the line in 4:02 which was fine, Dan was pretty knackered and I wasn’t much better. I don’t think I felt any less wiped out than if I’d run 3:20, but then I’m not in great shape right now anyway. We headed back into the Pyramids to stretch and warm up a bit which was great, but there was no free soup this year which sucked.

As a day out it was great, decent weather and a nice long run with Dan was great, but as a race it felt like it had gone downhill a bit from last year. There were way too many people on the course, the medal was a bit flimsy compared to last year’s nice chunky one, and no free grub at the end sucked – the thought of a nice warm cup of soup was keeping me going for the last mile or so.

It’s hard to get too down on it though, next up is 24 laps of Orrell…

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progress award

2/12/2014

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Even though I've been running for nearly five years now, have run 17 ultras and 37 marathons, and this year have won two ultras and had six other top three finishes, I still feel like an imposter when I'm running with my running club, Southport & Waterloo Athletics club. In my head I'm still the fat out of breath numpty, sweating and shuffling around the block that first time - those guys are proper athletes. Most of the runners I run with have years of experience, and PBs I can only dream of.

So it was surreal, and incredible that I won the Progress trophy at our annual awards last week. The set up I got during the ceremony was amazing - I was so simultaneously proud and embarrassed I though my head would explode, but that might have been the beer. Here's what they said:

"The senior Progress Trophy is awarded to a senior road runner for improvement in performance. Runners in the frame this year and well deserving of a mention included David Marsh, Justin Baddeley, Paul Warrington, Keith Lunt, Paula Davies and Rachel Jacks. But this year’s winner brought his marathon PB down from 3.26 to 3.13 at Blackpool and then to 3:09 at Wolverhampton; ran successive half marathon PBs at Liverpool, Southport and Fleetwood, down to 1:28; ran a 5K PB of 19:36 in June; ran back to back marathons at Bolton Hill; won 2 Ultra races, the Oldham Way Ultra in March, 40 miles in 7:49, and the Long Good Friday Ultra, running 43 1-mile laps in the allotted 6 hours. Having run 6 marathons in November alone, he deserved enormous respect. The Progress Trophy winner for 2014 went to an ultra runner for the first time …. Ben Wittenberg"

All the other winners are here: Southport & Waterloo AC

God knows what I'm going to have to do next year if I want to retain it (only one person's done that before), but I reckon I'll think of something...

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December double (day 1)

2/12/2014

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After a tarmac overdose in Cleethorpes it was time to hit the trails in Stratford-upon-Avon for an out and back marathon. I’d been a bit anxious in the run up to the race as the route description was really sketchy, the gpx trace on the website didn’t seem to follow any actual paths, and the race director had been emailing all week apologising about how little signage there was going to be – but I needn’t have bothered.

There were even more familiar faces here than Cleethorpes, Beth was there again (and took second lady), as was Richard who’d run Oldham way earlier in the year. We had a good chat at the start and then after a mile or two fell into pace together and chatted our way around the rest of the race together which was great.

Underfoot was tricky in places, after a little stretch of tow path early on, there was an awful lot of mud. Not really a problem on the way out, but on the way back with tired legs there were a few grim bits, trudging through fields picking up more and more mud on our shoes before the next short tarmac stretch where we could bang it all off again.

The signage was actually brilliant, I didn’t look at the route description at all for the first half, but there were a few changes to the route back which nearly caught us out. First was a diversion around a set of stocks in some little village. On the way out we ran straight down this path, but on the way back we had to detour around to the left, then back through a field to re-join the trail we’d taken earlier. We nearly missed it, but after a chat with some other runners (including Nick Cockburn who was running his 49th marathon that day), we went the right way.

Richard and I were chatting then about how glad we were we realised, and how gutted we’d have been to inadvertently take a shorter route, which was sort of funny since we nearly did it again later.

One bit of the route on the way out meant coming off the tow path and running up the road a bit to a pub, turning around, and re-joining the tow path to carry on. On the way back at about 24 miles, the signage indicated that we just carry on straight through on the return leg, missing the pub out. Richard and I chatted about it, and it seemed to make sense. The guy manning the CP at the pub on the way out had said he’d be gone by 1230, and we’d run an extra loop on the way back, so combined with the arrow pointing us straight on we were sure we’d done the right thing. Then a guy who’d been in front of came running up behind us and told us we’d missed the pub. We dug out our route descriptions and realised he was right, swore quite a lot, and turned back, picking up another guy who’d just done exactly the same.

Again we were glad we’d gone back and done the right thing, apart from the risk of a DQ, seriously, what’s the point if you’re going to cut the course?

Unfortunately though, three other guys who’d passed us earlier had all missed the pub out. The guy who’d helped us out had come 4th to them, and Richard and I had come joint 6th. He was rightly pissed off, and after a stewards enquiry, he was awarded the win, with the three guys getting 2nd, 3rd and 4th. I’m not entirely sure what logic dictates that they didn’t run the course properly enough to win, but they did enough to come 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Only people starting at 0900 were eligible for prizes so if they didn’t want to DQ them it would have made more sense to give them a finish, but not in the 0900 start category.

Unprompted the race direct has offered me and Richard free places at another event which I guess is cool, but to be honest I’d rather have had the third place finish that we slogged our guts out for.

That aside, it was a great race. The route was really scenic, challenging, the aid stations were well stocked by happy marshals, the course marking was brilliant, and the food at the end was spectacular. The goody bag was pretty cool too, with a bottle of cider and a nice glass. Throw in the fact I was able to get a shower before the three hour drive home and it was a top race all round.

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maravan marathon

2/12/2014

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Once I’d stopped being a big baby about missing the last three days of HOAH, I started looking for races and found this one. A double marathon (Sat/Sun), running around an out of season caravan park in Cleethorpes. On the one hand, that sounds a bit bleak, but on the other, it sounds like an episode of Scooby-Doo, so I entered.

It was a three hour drive away so I opted for just doing the Saturday. It was tough dragging myself out of bed to leave at 0500 once, never mind twice. I got to the pub to register and back down to the start which was about half a mile away. I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I knew, but Beth and Kate were there as well as a few other faces I recognised which was really cool.

There was a bit of faffing about at the start. The idea was we run half a mile or so to the finish, then run seven loops around the park, but the finish wasn’t set up in time to drop our bags there beforehand. Instead, the relay runners that were doing the event in teams took our bags and dropped them off there for us.

A little later than planned, we were off, initially following the race director on his bike. The race notes and briefing had all said that the course was marked, which it was, although not especially well. The first loop was mayhem, I was running at the front with two other guys and a relay runner and we had to stop a few times, and were regularly running into people coming back towards us or from another path. We sort of took it in turns to lead/get lost, and then double back to get back on track which was a bit frustrating. We ended up coming into the finish area the wrong way after the first lap, but the second lap was better (once they’d added some more markings), and by the third we were pretty sure we knew where we were going.

After lap three I needed a gel so I dropped into the finish area to look for my bag. As it’d been taken there by someone else I had no idea where it was, and it took a good few minutes of rummaging around to find it. Once I’d got myself sorted and back out on the course the other guys were long gone and I was running on my own from then on.

I lapped a few people on the next few laps which was nice in terms of a bit of company and being reassured I was on the right track, but on lap five I missed a turning and found myself on another part of the caravan park. The thing with caravan parks is they all look the same, and I had no idea how long I’d been running down the wrong path, or where I should have been. I had no choice but to run back the way I’d come and find where I’d gone wrong. A mile or so on I spotted some tape, and got back on track, feeling a bit stupid, but not too annoyed.

I started to feel pretty wiped out during lap 6, but it felt really good to be starting lap 7, and I somehow managed to keep dragging myself around to the finish. I hit 26.2 miles in 3:14 which surprised me, although between a few wrong turns and the course being long, I actually ended up running 28.4 miles in 3:28, and coming third which I was really happy with.

Overall it was a good day, the weather was great, and I love the ingenuity of using the out of season holiday park for a road run. The course marking was a bit of a pain though, and not for a lack of signage either. One piece of tape before a turn and another after is all it really needed, but there was tape in random places, and in a lot of cases just before a turn that you didn’t have to take. It was also pretty randomly placed, some high, some low, some on the left or right but not related to whether you were about to have to turn that way. Also, for an Autumn/Winter race, red and white barrier tape would be much easier to spot than black and yellow. But in the end it was ok, and I think I’d do one of their races again, even if it’s right on the edge of how far I can comfortably drive home after a race!

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