Matt Gets Running

Today’s half mara­thon — my first — went pretty well all round. I was a bit wor­ried by the amount of rain I could hear before I set out, but it turned into occa­sional drizzle for the race, which is per­fect jog­ging weather, really — no need to worry about overheating.

I kept jog­ging from the start line all the way around, with a few-minute inter­lude queuing for the toi­let right at the end of the Port­way sec­tion — this may be Too Much Inform­a­tion, but frankly I’ve always had a bit of a shy blad­der, so wee­ing in the bushes as 10,000 other people jog past is quite dif­fi­cult for me. Shame there weren’t more porta­loos, really, I could have done without hanging around in a queue for as long as I did…

I felt fine through the whole Port­way sec­tion, and only really star­ted flag­ging when we got to around the eighth mile, at the start of Cum­ber­land Road. I grabbed a Luc­ozade thingy from the help­ful army people hand­ing them out around there, though, and also ate half my Mule energy bar thing as I trogged down Cum­ber­land Road and into town. I don’t know if that really helped — frankly I’m not keen to try a con­trol exper­i­ment of doing another half mara­thon without them!

The city sec­tion was def­in­itely the hard­est. My thighs were start­ing to become a bid leaden, plus you have to jog within about half a mile of the fin­ish line, but go past it and on a cir­cuit­ous route around Queen Square, through Red­cliffe and around Castle Park and back. That last hill up Wine Street was a bit of a killer.

Still, the good thing about the city sec­tion is that there are people here there and every­where cheer­ing you on, and remind­ing you that there’s only three miles left to go, then only two miles left to go, then finally you’re on the last mile and you know you’re going to finish.

I kept jog­ging all the way to the end, though I didn’t have any­thing left for a final burst of speed. It was all I could do to keep stand­ing up, frankly.

I saw a few famil­iar faces, mostly from Twit­ter, on the way around, meet­ing @jorence on the way to the start, wav­ing at @mikeotaylor on the way past the start­ing line, and appar­ently @parryphernalia saw me com­ing through the fin­ish, though I was too intent on just keep­ing going without actu­ally dying to notice… Apo­lo­gies if you saw me and waved and I car­ried on obli­vi­ous; I was try­ing to stay vaguely aware of my sur­round­ings, but it’s quite easy to des­cend into “tun­nel vis­ion” as you go along.

Looks like my time will be some­where around three hours; my Run­Keeper log sug­gests 3:03:38, but I did set it off a little in advance of hit­ting the start­ing line, so I can’t be sure whether I’ll be over or under 3 hours. But frankly, who cares? I just ran my first half marathon!

EDIT: whoo hoo! Just checked the web­site, and my offi­cial time is now in. I must have set my timer off a fair bit in advance of the start, as it turns out, as my time was… 02:53:43! So, com­fort­ably under three hours, and I’m very happy indeed with that.

Of the non-Twitter people, the ones I was expect­ing to see didn’t let me down. My friends Mike and Jess were there near the fin­ish to cheer me on, and picked me up after­wards to walk me up to Roco­til­los and buy me one of their utterly deadly milk­shakes — this time I had a cookie dough milk­shake, extra thick, and I think that pretty much replaced all of the 2,362 cal­or­ies I’d just burned off, accord­ing to the Run­Keeper log.

So, a suc­cess all round! No injur­ies, no blisters. Some fairly ser­i­ous aches, though. I’ve just emerged gingerly from a very long Radox bath, and I’ve taken tomor­row off work so I don’t have to do much more than lie around on a sofa watch­ing telly, which is prob­ably all I’ll be good for…

Thanks to every­one who sponsored me. Looks like I’ll end up rais­ing more than £500 for Can­cer Research, once my com­pany matches the dona­tions, which is fantastic.

Any­way. I just men­tioned a sofa and a telly, didn’t I? Sounds like a good idea right now…