A summer of leaping out of bed at 6am to run culminated yesterday in the Windsor half marathon, run in the Windsor Great Park just down from Windsor Castle.
My running partner hurt her back and pulled out a few weeks ago, so it was just me and the Nike+ ipod, plus a support team of Jules, Willy, Fia and Ali (the injured one). The only sports injury was to Jules, who claims he got a chafed nipple from running alongside with the pushchair as I came down the Long Walk to the finish line! Didn't get a great deal of sympathy for that one...
All in all it was not too bad. Whoever described the course as gently undulating needs to be slapped about a bit, but otherwise no dramas or need for toilet stops (always a major worry - not so easy to duck behind a tree with 4000-odd people running past, although plenty of people did just that.
My chip time was 2hr22min53, which I was very pleased with, as usually on a training run 20km would take around 2 hr 30. Then I looked on the website and noticed that the person who finished immediately after me was a woman in the over-65 category!
As I came down the funnel after the finish line, there was a woman gushing to her husband 'I'm so sorry...how did you do?' And he mumbled something and said 'How about you?' And she said '2.20 - woohoo!" So she obviously left him for dead for being too slow.
Ali had brought champagne and a Victoria sponge for a picnic but as I finished it was starting to rain so we just went back to the car, and then spent an hour and a half trying to get out of the carpark, as everyone decided to leave at once.
You can see my official race photos here.
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