Well to be precise joint first, in the relatively slow time of 4 hours 58 minutes 7 seconds. I know this initially sounds bizarre, well this is how it happened . . . 
To start with I had a very eventful journey on the way down to Ilmington, which is in the Cotswolds, south of Stratford-upon-Avon. Firstly on the M6 between Stoke and Stafford I there was a burnt out lorry on the other carriageway and the road was closed so I knew I would be in for an eventful return journey. Then in Birmingham near the M6/M5 junction the traffic I came to a sudden and complete stop. No one moved for half an hour and all the drivers ended up turning their engines off and a few opened their car doors for fresh air. About 7 police cars and 2 fire engines zoomed down the hard shoulder so I knew it was serious and braced myself for a long wait. As time passed I got very worried that my very early start and driving over 80 miles, may have all been in vain. Would I be thwarted by this incident and miss the start of the marathon? Luckily the traffic suddenly started as quickly as it had stopped and within 200 meters of where I had stopped there was a car on it’s roof. If I had only been a couple of minutes earlier I would have missed it all. I had lost over half an hour and the pressure was on as to whether I would get to the start in time.
The rest of the journey was still not incident free, there was a lady who abruptly stopped in front of me and then a pheasant walked out, wanting to commit suicide! I was feeling like I wasn’t meant to get there. My map reading was good and I got to the cricket club in Ilmington with 15 minutes to spare.
I parked up next the Paul Allen and with us being similar paced runners, we immediately agreed to run together. For those of you who haven’t run one of Chris Seeney’s low key marathons, speed isn’t everything and me and Paul knew this.
Chris Seeney – Race Director Extraordinaire
With one of Chris’s runs you can pretty much start when you want. At the Race Registration you are issued with your race number, maps and several pages of instructions. With a combination of Paul reading the instructions and me with the maps and both of us scouring the landscape we were able to make good time along the course.
We soon caught up and initially ran with several runners from Teignbridge Runners, including the 2 Rogers, but after a few miles and a steep climb we pushed on and left them behind.
Luck seemed not to be on my side and only 0.4 miles into the race I ran into a clip on one of the many kissing gates we had to go through. This immediately gave me a dead leg and left the top of my right leg sore for the rest of the race.
We carried on through the whole of the course carefully making sure we kept on course, for the worst thing we could do was to get lost. Steadily we over took other runners who had started earlier. Chris kept driving around the course to check on the progress of his race and to look after the volunteers at the check points. He passed us a few times and kept commenting on how fast we were doing the course. We found this quite amusing considering how slow we were going in comparison to a normal road marathon.
The further we progressed in the race it dawned on us that we were actually joint first, something I have never done before in a marathon! Once all the runners had completed the marathon Chris Seeney officially declared that Paul and I had actually come first!
Ilmington Victors
