Halton 5 miles

It was actually a very enjoyable race this morning, although I'm not quite sure why. The course is just about flat and fairly straight & potentially very quick. The problem is that it's a 'point to point' course & today that meant that we had quite a strong head wind for the whole race. Normally you get some respite from the wind, but not today.

I travelled to the race with Richard R, neither of us had run a 5 mile race before, so we were both guaranteed PBs. There were about 800 people running, of which the majority weren't club runners, the clubs that were represented were mainly local ones from the Merseyside area, so there were no familiar faces at the start line.

The race starts going over the Runcorn Bridge, which apparently is the same design as the Sydney Harbour Bridge (although I'm sure that it would have been a lot warmer running in Sydney today). Richard set of at a blistering pace, being close to the lead at the end of the bridge and within half a mile was at least 20 seconds ahead of me. It wasn't that I set off slowly, going through the first mile in about 5:37.

My intention had been to try to run under 30 minutes, my mile splits gave me some confidence of being able to achieve this: 5:37, 5:47, 6:02, 6:02 for the first 4. Throughout the race I stayed about 20 seconds behind Richard. By the last mile the headwind was taking it's toll & I was slowing, the problem was that my Garmin beeped for 5 miles (in about 29:50) still about 150 metres from the finish. So my actual finish time was about 30:22 (not seen the official results yet). Richard reckoned that he was about 30:04.

In some ways it was disappointing to not run faster than 30 minutes, but I probably finished in the first 30 or so runners out of about 800 which wasn't too bad. If the wind had been blowing in the opposite direction, I'm sure that times would have been well over a minute faster.....maybe another time?

It's a well organised race, well marshalled on closed roads & with a goody bag, t-shirt, free coffee, water & hot cross buns at the finish & free coach ride back to the car park at the start. Not bad for £7 entry fee (why do some races charge 3 or 4 times that amount?).