Review of North West Half Marathon 2015 in Blackpool
If I could sum up this weekend’s half marathon (13.1miles) in just one word, I couldn’t do it justice.
Therefore, a photo seemed entirely more appropriate.
Yes, that’s me. In pain.
The North West half marathon is advertised as being one of the flattest courses. I did in fact hear at the beginning of the race, a guy say, “This is quite flat, right? So it’ll be a quick course.”
I cursed that guy on the route round for giving me, and everyone who heard him, false hope.
The day started out relatively well. I was one of the first people to arrive at 8.30am on the dot, simply because I don’t sleep very well the night before racing due to nerves. On the door stood Jay, a cheerful lady who told me, “This way, Blossom.” After collecting my number and timing chip, on my way back out, I confided in Jay and said, “I’m nervous as hell,” and brilliant Jay said she’d cheer me on and that I would be fine.
Well, of course a little bit of me knew I would be fine. This is of course, supposed to be a training run for me, part of the plan for a full marathon. My last half marathon was my very first, in Leeds, 5 years ago, and even then I knew that the Leeds course was hilly but I still managed to acquire a respectable 2:12min finish time.
The weather for Blackpool had threatened to rain two weeks prior to the race. Every day I checked the forecast in the run up to the race and it kept saying torrential rain. For once, the weather forecasters got their predictions spot on. When does that ever happen?!!!
Returning to my car, I pinned my number to my waterproof jacket. Got changed. Sipped a bit of water. The clock said 9am. The race didn’t start until 11am. Sitting there, I went through all the things that could go wrong, from breaking my leg to running a slow time. I ended up Twittering and Facebooking about my fears and anxiety until about 9.30am. After reading the lovely host of replies, and forcing myself to eat cold peanut butter on toast that I’d brought with me, it was time to make a move.
Standing in the foyer of Runner HQ I saw @MohicanRunner. Quite easy to spot. After saying hello, and trying in the nicest possible way to explain that my following him was purely of Twitter form, he told me that he was hoping to finish the race in a time of “80-something.” I say, “80-something” because I stopped paying attention when the number 80 cropped up. Clearly, anyone who calculates their run times in minutes, as opposed to hours, is on another running plain to me, and I quickly moved on, not wanting my crazy nerves to affect this elite runner.
Going outside, I managed to do a warm up for a few minutes. As it became evident that a few minutes outside was starting to result in very wet running gear, I headed back indoors.
I chatted to quite a few people. There was Zipper Girl who questioned other runners on whether running zipped up was preferable to leaving the jacket open. You’ll see that I named people because I really can’t remember any names. There was Norfolk girl, who had stayed at the Hilton hotel the night before and wasn’t training for anything, she just liked to travel the country and run races without doing any training. Then there was Newbie, a full time working mum who had only been running for 6 months and was already doing her first half marathon with her four year old daughter and family watching from the side-lines.
Newbie, Norfolk Girl and I walked out together. The commentator, Brian Porter, was in fine form, yelling, joking, telling us it’d all be over and it was “just a bit of rain” or words to that effect.
With a few minutes to go, we lined up. By this point, my nerves had gone haywire and adrenaline had kicked in. I wished my new found friends good luck on at least three occasions, the two runners in front got high fived, and I kept jumping on the spot like a lunatic.
“Come on!” I shouted, clapping my hands. To stay warm.
Then we were off! I switched on my Garmin.
Then we stopped.
Reset Garmin.
“Come on!” Lots more clapping.
Then we were off! For real! Woop woop!
Despite my clearly well thought out advice to Newbie behind me, which consisted of telling her to take it easy at the beginning, I completely ignored my good words and legged it as far as I could with the other runners. It was the excitement you see, I had been waiting all morning and woken up at various intervals the preceding night, for this moment. I was like a lolloping Labrador complete with tongue hanging out. Labrador, not a Greyhound (for greyhound imagery, please go back to @MohicanRunner).
Running past the 1 mile point, I looked at my Garmin and heck, I was running an 8 minute mile. Suddenly, the conversation I had had with my physiotherapist that Thursday jumped into my mind:
“How are you going to run the race on Sunday?”
“I’ll not be stupid. I’ll try and stick to a 9 minute mile throughout the course which will bring me in just under 2 hours which would be a dream come true.”
“Good idea. You don’t want to burn out by mile 10. Enjoy it.”
A splurge of rain brought me back to my senses. It could have been sea water. At that time, we were all running next to the sea and waves were crashing upwards against the promenade.
Then the 3 mile marker went past! I was shocked! What had just happened to mile 2? Did I miss it? Did I pass out? Looking at my Garmin, it showed 1.27 miles and I realised – this was a lap and I’d have to do it all over again.
How I wished it was mile 3.
So we climbed a little back onto the top of the ‘cliff’ if you can call it that. Then the wind hit. Sheltered on the promenade, we were drenched with rain but at least the wind wasn’t there.
Oh God, the wind. At first, it was great, it cooled us down. But then it was hell.
So after we had all done that first loop twice, we moved a little bit further up the coast. To do another loop-the-loop but a much longer one. And a much windier one.
At this point, at about mile 6, I’m still doing no more than 8:10min mile and wondering when my body was going to give in.
There was ice on the promenade at the edges so I had to revise my overtaking strategy. At one point (well, two points) we passed a go-karting track but I think it had shut down by point two.
And then, up ahead – there’s Zipper Girl! Running like a trooper! I was joyous to see someone who I vaguely recognised from the time when we were dry, better looking and smiling! She was whizzing ahead and then I got overtaken by Chinese Skinny girl and I growled. Not only was she beating me, but she was skinnier than me.
Running on, I was wishing for a change of scenery (remember the phrase, “Be Careful What You Wish For?”) and we moved up a slope off the promenade to the top of the hill. Oh. My God.
The wind nearly blew some of us off the cliff. I thought back to Zipper Girl and wondered how her jacket was doing. I thought about poor Chinese Skinny Girl flying into the sea. Then a guy in a policeman’s hat pushing a wheelbarrow went past and I wondered if I was hallucinating. (I wasn’t).
Coming off that awful stretch, I saw a water station and held out my hand. I tried to sip from the open bottle but was surprised at how hard it was to run at that speed and drink. I got maybe one sip from four attempts, with half of the bottle being sloshed all over my face, but by that point I hardly felt it. I was saturated already.
I was wishing and wishing so much to see the next florescent mile sign and mile 7 approached. The route went downhill then uphill and downhill and uphill and on those uphill stretches the wind was IN.MY.FACE.
By mile 8 I was planning on how I was going to tell my family and friends that I had decided to pull out of the marathon. I wasn’t cut out for this sort of pain. This sort of torture. Why would someone DO this to themselves? Who was I to think I could do this twice over? Had I gone mad?
I checked my Garmin. My time had dropped to 9.08m a minute and I started to panic. What if I didn’t get under 2 hours now? What if after all this hard, crazy running, I came in just over 2 hours and had to do it all again next year? It started to snow.
As I felt the panic well up, and a little sickness hit my stomach, we ran down a hill, and the wind dropped.
We were back on the promenade. Looking up, I saw runners above me. Then the undeniable truth hit me. I had to go back up to that hellish stretch of the course with the wind again.
Running along the promenade, I realised that if I was going to make it under 2 hours, this was the time to run as fast as I could manage. At mile 9, I managed an exact 8min mile – it was my fastest part of the course.
At mile 10, I told myself it was only 5k. “5k left to go, that’s a ParkRun.”
By this point, I was still overtaking people but I could see in the distance the point of no return.
At first, I refused to let it beat me. The wind blew me sideways at first. I kept telling myself it was a flat route and that it was only my legs tired, and that these weren’t hills. I leaned so far forward in the wind, I could have been an extra in Michael Jackson’s ‘Smooth Criminal’.
Then up ahead, through the blur, through the dripping nose, the frozen lower jaw, the screaming legs, I saw Zipper Girl! Come on, I told myself, get to Zipper Girl!
But then before I knew it, at mile 11.5, Zipper Girl had stopped to barf.
Mile 12 was incredibly tough. I kept trying to run behind people, especially pairs of people, just to get out the wind. I so wanted to stop. So so badly. But I knew that if I did stop, I would have let myself down. I couldn’t look back and curse myself for going too fast at the start followed by stopping so near the finish. I wouldn’t forgive myself.
It hurt so much. Then I thought of my Facebook and Twitter friends who had all wished me good luck that morning when I was panicking in my car. Honest to God, that’s what I thought of at mile 12, when the Garmin was only clocking a 9.30min mile.
At 12.5 miles I saw Chinese Skinny Girl! I was approaching her! I was overtaking her! No way! Me beating Chinese Skinny Girl! Did you not see how brilliant she was?!!!
I could hear myself (and others) breathing/groaning. Then my MP3 player started to blare out “Don’t You Worry, Don’t You Worry Child” and although I am a massive Swedish House Mafia fan, at that particular moment, my mind screamed “GET LOST” (or words to that effect cough cough).
I could see mile marker 13. I was there! But where was the finish line?! I couldn’t see it! No! It had to be there! Then there was Jay, the Blossom lady, waving and clapping and who completely didn’t recognise me, but then when faced with a transformation from a glamourous blonde to the human version of a drowned out Labrador, who could blame her?
Seeing the finish, my first thought was, “What’s my time? My time? My time?!!!”
My second thought was, “No! Chinese Skinny Girl just passed me!”
Followed by, “Who cares?! I just did a SUB 2 HOUR HALF MARATHON!”
I allowed myself a smile when passing the line (that's the best smile I could do).
A guy offered me a bottle of water. It was like offering a starving desert islander a tin of beans with no tin opener. He opened it for me. I was violently shaking.
With my goody bag in hand, I saw Skinny Chinese Girl and tapping her on the arm, wished her well done, joking she had been my nemesis in that race. She told me that it was her first. ever. race. My smile faded.
Following the crowd, I tried to let the result sink in, but it didn’t. I looked at my Garmin and saw it read 1 hour 51 minutes. I couldn’t believe it.
Despite being ridiculously cold, I hobbled to my car to get my phone, so I could get a photo.
Returning to outside the hotel, I begged a guy to take off his gloves to tap my phone for a photo and I got one with Blackpool Tower sticking out of my head!
It took 45 minutes at least to stop shaking. I changed, lent my towel to a few dozen people, queued for what seemed like hours for a hot coffee and helped to warm up other runners with the use of a car, energy bars and jumpers! (That’s another story).
Thanks so much to the organisers of the day, Fylde Coast Runners and to the wonderful photographer Mick Hall who got some fab snaps of the action.
Am I doing it again? Am I doing the marathon? Yes Yes Yes!
Follow me @JWilbyPalmer
PS. Check out Dave McColgan’s review of the same race here!
Therefore, a photo seemed entirely more appropriate.
Yes, that’s me. In pain.
The North West half marathon is advertised as being one of the flattest courses. I did in fact hear at the beginning of the race, a guy say, “This is quite flat, right? So it’ll be a quick course.”
I cursed that guy on the route round for giving me, and everyone who heard him, false hope.
The day started out relatively well. I was one of the first people to arrive at 8.30am on the dot, simply because I don’t sleep very well the night before racing due to nerves. On the door stood Jay, a cheerful lady who told me, “This way, Blossom.” After collecting my number and timing chip, on my way back out, I confided in Jay and said, “I’m nervous as hell,” and brilliant Jay said she’d cheer me on and that I would be fine.
Well, of course a little bit of me knew I would be fine. This is of course, supposed to be a training run for me, part of the plan for a full marathon. My last half marathon was my very first, in Leeds, 5 years ago, and even then I knew that the Leeds course was hilly but I still managed to acquire a respectable 2:12min finish time.
The weather for Blackpool had threatened to rain two weeks prior to the race. Every day I checked the forecast in the run up to the race and it kept saying torrential rain. For once, the weather forecasters got their predictions spot on. When does that ever happen?!!!
Returning to my car, I pinned my number to my waterproof jacket. Got changed. Sipped a bit of water. The clock said 9am. The race didn’t start until 11am. Sitting there, I went through all the things that could go wrong, from breaking my leg to running a slow time. I ended up Twittering and Facebooking about my fears and anxiety until about 9.30am. After reading the lovely host of replies, and forcing myself to eat cold peanut butter on toast that I’d brought with me, it was time to make a move.
Standing in the foyer of Runner HQ I saw @MohicanRunner. Quite easy to spot. After saying hello, and trying in the nicest possible way to explain that my following him was purely of Twitter form, he told me that he was hoping to finish the race in a time of “80-something.” I say, “80-something” because I stopped paying attention when the number 80 cropped up. Clearly, anyone who calculates their run times in minutes, as opposed to hours, is on another running plain to me, and I quickly moved on, not wanting my crazy nerves to affect this elite runner.
Going outside, I managed to do a warm up for a few minutes. As it became evident that a few minutes outside was starting to result in very wet running gear, I headed back indoors.
I chatted to quite a few people. There was Zipper Girl who questioned other runners on whether running zipped up was preferable to leaving the jacket open. You’ll see that I named people because I really can’t remember any names. There was Norfolk girl, who had stayed at the Hilton hotel the night before and wasn’t training for anything, she just liked to travel the country and run races without doing any training. Then there was Newbie, a full time working mum who had only been running for 6 months and was already doing her first half marathon with her four year old daughter and family watching from the side-lines.
Newbie, Norfolk Girl and I walked out together. The commentator, Brian Porter, was in fine form, yelling, joking, telling us it’d all be over and it was “just a bit of rain” or words to that effect.
With a few minutes to go, we lined up. By this point, my nerves had gone haywire and adrenaline had kicked in. I wished my new found friends good luck on at least three occasions, the two runners in front got high fived, and I kept jumping on the spot like a lunatic.
“Come on!” I shouted, clapping my hands. To stay warm.
Then we were off! I switched on my Garmin.
Then we stopped.
Reset Garmin.
“Come on!” Lots more clapping.
Then we were off! For real! Woop woop!
Despite my clearly well thought out advice to Newbie behind me, which consisted of telling her to take it easy at the beginning, I completely ignored my good words and legged it as far as I could with the other runners. It was the excitement you see, I had been waiting all morning and woken up at various intervals the preceding night, for this moment. I was like a lolloping Labrador complete with tongue hanging out. Labrador, not a Greyhound (for greyhound imagery, please go back to @MohicanRunner).
Running past the 1 mile point, I looked at my Garmin and heck, I was running an 8 minute mile. Suddenly, the conversation I had had with my physiotherapist that Thursday jumped into my mind:
“How are you going to run the race on Sunday?”
“I’ll not be stupid. I’ll try and stick to a 9 minute mile throughout the course which will bring me in just under 2 hours which would be a dream come true.”
“Good idea. You don’t want to burn out by mile 10. Enjoy it.”
A splurge of rain brought me back to my senses. It could have been sea water. At that time, we were all running next to the sea and waves were crashing upwards against the promenade.
Then the 3 mile marker went past! I was shocked! What had just happened to mile 2? Did I miss it? Did I pass out? Looking at my Garmin, it showed 1.27 miles and I realised – this was a lap and I’d have to do it all over again.
How I wished it was mile 3.
So we climbed a little back onto the top of the ‘cliff’ if you can call it that. Then the wind hit. Sheltered on the promenade, we were drenched with rain but at least the wind wasn’t there.
Oh God, the wind. At first, it was great, it cooled us down. But then it was hell.
So after we had all done that first loop twice, we moved a little bit further up the coast. To do another loop-the-loop but a much longer one. And a much windier one.
At this point, at about mile 6, I’m still doing no more than 8:10min mile and wondering when my body was going to give in.
There was ice on the promenade at the edges so I had to revise my overtaking strategy. At one point (well, two points) we passed a go-karting track but I think it had shut down by point two.
And then, up ahead – there’s Zipper Girl! Running like a trooper! I was joyous to see someone who I vaguely recognised from the time when we were dry, better looking and smiling! She was whizzing ahead and then I got overtaken by Chinese Skinny girl and I growled. Not only was she beating me, but she was skinnier than me.
Running on, I was wishing for a change of scenery (remember the phrase, “Be Careful What You Wish For?”) and we moved up a slope off the promenade to the top of the hill. Oh. My God.
The wind nearly blew some of us off the cliff. I thought back to Zipper Girl and wondered how her jacket was doing. I thought about poor Chinese Skinny Girl flying into the sea. Then a guy in a policeman’s hat pushing a wheelbarrow went past and I wondered if I was hallucinating. (I wasn’t).
Coming off that awful stretch, I saw a water station and held out my hand. I tried to sip from the open bottle but was surprised at how hard it was to run at that speed and drink. I got maybe one sip from four attempts, with half of the bottle being sloshed all over my face, but by that point I hardly felt it. I was saturated already.
I was wishing and wishing so much to see the next florescent mile sign and mile 7 approached. The route went downhill then uphill and downhill and uphill and on those uphill stretches the wind was IN.MY.FACE.
By mile 8 I was planning on how I was going to tell my family and friends that I had decided to pull out of the marathon. I wasn’t cut out for this sort of pain. This sort of torture. Why would someone DO this to themselves? Who was I to think I could do this twice over? Had I gone mad?
I checked my Garmin. My time had dropped to 9.08m a minute and I started to panic. What if I didn’t get under 2 hours now? What if after all this hard, crazy running, I came in just over 2 hours and had to do it all again next year? It started to snow.
As I felt the panic well up, and a little sickness hit my stomach, we ran down a hill, and the wind dropped.
We were back on the promenade. Looking up, I saw runners above me. Then the undeniable truth hit me. I had to go back up to that hellish stretch of the course with the wind again.
Running along the promenade, I realised that if I was going to make it under 2 hours, this was the time to run as fast as I could manage. At mile 9, I managed an exact 8min mile – it was my fastest part of the course.
At mile 10, I told myself it was only 5k. “5k left to go, that’s a ParkRun.”
By this point, I was still overtaking people but I could see in the distance the point of no return.
At first, I refused to let it beat me. The wind blew me sideways at first. I kept telling myself it was a flat route and that it was only my legs tired, and that these weren’t hills. I leaned so far forward in the wind, I could have been an extra in Michael Jackson’s ‘Smooth Criminal’.
Then up ahead, through the blur, through the dripping nose, the frozen lower jaw, the screaming legs, I saw Zipper Girl! Come on, I told myself, get to Zipper Girl!
But then before I knew it, at mile 11.5, Zipper Girl had stopped to barf.
Mile 12 was incredibly tough. I kept trying to run behind people, especially pairs of people, just to get out the wind. I so wanted to stop. So so badly. But I knew that if I did stop, I would have let myself down. I couldn’t look back and curse myself for going too fast at the start followed by stopping so near the finish. I wouldn’t forgive myself.
It hurt so much. Then I thought of my Facebook and Twitter friends who had all wished me good luck that morning when I was panicking in my car. Honest to God, that’s what I thought of at mile 12, when the Garmin was only clocking a 9.30min mile.
At 12.5 miles I saw Chinese Skinny Girl! I was approaching her! I was overtaking her! No way! Me beating Chinese Skinny Girl! Did you not see how brilliant she was?!!!
I could hear myself (and others) breathing/groaning. Then my MP3 player started to blare out “Don’t You Worry, Don’t You Worry Child” and although I am a massive Swedish House Mafia fan, at that particular moment, my mind screamed “GET LOST” (or words to that effect cough cough).
I could see mile marker 13. I was there! But where was the finish line?! I couldn’t see it! No! It had to be there! Then there was Jay, the Blossom lady, waving and clapping and who completely didn’t recognise me, but then when faced with a transformation from a glamourous blonde to the human version of a drowned out Labrador, who could blame her?
Seeing the finish, my first thought was, “What’s my time? My time? My time?!!!”
My second thought was, “No! Chinese Skinny Girl just passed me!”
Followed by, “Who cares?! I just did a SUB 2 HOUR HALF MARATHON!”
I allowed myself a smile when passing the line (that's the best smile I could do).
A guy offered me a bottle of water. It was like offering a starving desert islander a tin of beans with no tin opener. He opened it for me. I was violently shaking.
With my goody bag in hand, I saw Skinny Chinese Girl and tapping her on the arm, wished her well done, joking she had been my nemesis in that race. She told me that it was her first. ever. race. My smile faded.
Following the crowd, I tried to let the result sink in, but it didn’t. I looked at my Garmin and saw it read 1 hour 51 minutes. I couldn’t believe it.
Despite being ridiculously cold, I hobbled to my car to get my phone, so I could get a photo.
Returning to outside the hotel, I begged a guy to take off his gloves to tap my phone for a photo and I got one with Blackpool Tower sticking out of my head!
It took 45 minutes at least to stop shaking. I changed, lent my towel to a few dozen people, queued for what seemed like hours for a hot coffee and helped to warm up other runners with the use of a car, energy bars and jumpers! (That’s another story).
Thanks so much to the organisers of the day, Fylde Coast Runners and to the wonderful photographer Mick Hall who got some fab snaps of the action.
Am I doing it again? Am I doing the marathon? Yes Yes Yes!
Follow me @JWilbyPalmer
PS. Check out Dave McColgan’s review of the same race here!
Congratulations Jane, you have given me more motivation now
ReplyDeleteVery entertaining read
I am doing the Blackpool half in April and I am slightly nervous now
It will be my first 1/2 (having just lost 12 stone!)
http://pondomarathon.blogspot.co.uk/
Looking forward to hearing of your marathon run
good luck
Hey Danny, thanks so much for posting. If you can manage to lose an amazing 12 stone, then I know you will do brilliantly in the half marathon! Good luck - keep me posted on how you get on :-)
ReplyDeleteJust read your Manchester Marathon Post - Great Read and it has given me more inspiration for Sunday's Run, Thank you
ReplyDeleteHi Danny, thanks so much for the lovely comments again, am chuffed you liked it - think it gives a pretty "guts and all" account of what Manchester was like! I will be thinking of you and some other friends 'competing' (is that the right word?) on Sunday - looks like you've got the weather for it. Will be watching and sending lots of happy thoughts your way - you will smash it, I am sure - you and my other friends are so inspiring - making changes in your lives to be better people - it's just fab.
ReplyDeleteHere's a link to access the review of the Manchester marathon should anyone want to access it: http://jwilbypalmer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/review-of-greater-manchester-marathon.html
I did it, I did it!
ReplyDeletehttp://pondomarathon.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/blackpool-half-marathon.html
I was definitely thankful that we had much better weather than expected, and I now have the half marathon bug!
Amazing Danny - that's brilliant, and what a great time - you must be so chuffed with yourself! I'm also focusing on half marathons from now on. Will definitely do Blackpool again, maybe next year, if only for the lovely people I met there. Hope to see you there one day!
ReplyDelete