I entered the MadeYaRun round the Reservoir race only a couple of weeks before the event. It wasn’t part of my planned marathon schedule but fitted nicely into a gap between marathons on my race calendar. I also thought it would be nice to sample one of Linda and Dave Major’s races before they disappear to run round the world next year.
The weather was lovely, too warm really for marathon running but I suppose I couldn’t complain after last years extremely wet summer.
The event was a two day affair and I was entered for the second day. The night before the race I saw some comments on facebook about day 1 and realised I may have an outside chance of winning the race. I’ve never won a marathon and I would dearly love to be able to say that I had. On several occassions I have come second and once joint first but never outright won a marathon. Once I had arrived at the start of the race in Northampton I found out that the previous days winner had completed the course in an impressive 2:59. If he was to produce anything similar on day 2 then I would have no chance of winning, it did look like a second place was more possible from knowing quite a lot of the small field of runners. The only way I could win was if this runner, who was unknown to me wasn’t prepared for running consecutive marathons.
The course consists of 6 laps of a reservoir along mostly tarmac and trail paths and was traffic free. There were 6 kissing gates to go through on each lap making an impressive 36 gates to go through over the 26 mile course. So even though the course was fairly flat several minutes would be lost going through all these gates. The race started and immediately yesterday’s winner went into the lead. I decided to follow him for the first lap and see how both of us coped, him on day 2 and me running close to my race pace limit. I ran the first lap very fast for me but even so I was some 100 meters behind at the end of the lap. I still kept the pressure on during the second lap but by the end of it the front runner was out of sight and I was feeling both the effects of the fast early pace and the hot sunny weather. For lap 3 I still kept a very good momentum going but by the end of it I felt like I was going to explode as I was seriously over heating. By lap 4 I had resigned myself to the fact I would only manage second place and decided to reduce my pace to something much more sensible for me in such hot weather. I do like to try and get my faster marathons under 3:30 and thought this one would be well inside that goal but as I finished lap 5 struggling with the heat I realised that wasn’t the case and I was out side this time. I dug in with all my mental concentration to try and dip under this time goal and had all but given up when I got to the last bend and realised it was still just possible. I legged it into the finish in 3 hours 29 minutes and 10 seconds totally exhausted and very dehydrated.
At the finish with winner, Paul Davies.
After finishing I enjoyed sitting near the finish on a large stone in the cool dappled shade of some large trees drinking and eating the sandwiches I had brought while watching the other runners finish. I really enjoyed the friendly, relaxed low key nature of the event and the pleasant countryside course. I liked seeing all the thistles along the route, I’ve never seen so many before. When we started the race there was also an abundance of lovely powder blue flowers. After the race I went back to take a photo of them but to my surprise they had all shrivelled up. At least I managed to get a few nice photos of the thistles.
Thank you to both Linda and Dave for arranging such a pleasant event.
A shame I didn’t win but maybe another day.
