EDF Birmingham Half Marathon

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After the rigours of the Mudrunner on the previous Sunday I was fairly confident that this was going to be reasonably easy going in comparison even though it was more than twice the distance.

This was only my second ever competitive half marathon and I was fairly confident of improving on my time set at Hereford this year. The course was mainly flat but there were a couple of gentle up hill gradients during the last 3 miles.

Although the run itself was fairly enoyable the race organisation at the start and finish was desperately in need of improvement.

The start was generally chaotic and was very poorly marshalled with many slower runners starting much further forward than they should have which made for a lot of congestion early in the race. I spent virtually the whole race overtaking slower runners after making the mistake of starting too far back. The finish was equally mis-managed although I had the ability to finish ahead of the main body of runners so had a clear finish but a few minutes later runners were actually having to queue to get over the finish line which must have been very frustrating for those who were heading for a pb and then found that they were delayed at the finish through no fault of their own!

The Mayor of Birmingham had stated in a TV interview that he wanted the Birmingham half marathon to emulate the Great North run in popularity. The organisers clearly have a lot of work to do to achieve that!

Finish position 1734 out of more than 13000 finishers in a time of 01:40:21, PB achieved…. I think I’m happy with that!

Frank

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