Kenilworth Half Marathon - 08 October 2006...

Distance: 13.1 miles

In a time of...
hh:mm:ss
01:38:40

Finishing Position: 177
Number of finishers: 634
Putting me in the top: 27.9%

My second Half Marathon, which I had originally intended to be a warm-up or practice run for the Lady Godiva Half Marathon two weeks later. I've since learned that I lack the ability to enter a race and not treat it as a race, what I ended up doing was trying to run my best time to gauge what I could expect to achieve in Coventry.

The race was ran over a lovely course, and went fantastically; it almost felt easy. That is without the terrible start that I personally blame on some poor organisation by the event officials. I tend to prefer warming up and reaching the start line with only a few minutes to spare (not like the Stratford Summer Six with seconds to spare), so I warmed up, and walked over to the start area, which was rather unstructured due to a small race field. As I stripped down, having removed my tracksuit trousers and just removed my jumper, I turned to my partner who'd come to support me, thanking her for coming and that I'd see her in a while. The starters horn sounded, with no prior warning at all, and to my knowledge a few minutes ahead of the scheduled start time. Along with a few others I ran to the back of the field and over the start line, I had an idea of the race pace I wanted to achieve along with a finishing time.

Starting off at the back I think had two advantages (although at the time I was feeling the negatives more!), for one it prevented me from going off too fast, I was limited in pace through being surrounded by other lower paced runners. Secondly, I spent the entire race overtaking people which was a tremendous boost mentally.

I finished with an improvement over my Shakespeare Half Marathon time. I'd enjoyed the course (hills and all) and was looking forward to the Godiva Half, only a fortnight away.