Reading Half Marathon – against all odds

I’d managed not to think about this race, really. I only opened the race pack last night, after a worrying few minutes when I thought I’d lost it completely, and it was only then I remembered I’d forgotten to book parking. (I do like the number with the chip on the back, save me doing that paranoid little skipping dance I generally do repeatedly mid-run when I’m convinced the chip has come off my ankle, and I like the fact that they included 4 safety pins. Little things make me happy.)
No problem re transport though, there’s a train at 8.14 from Bramley which gets to Reading 8.30am, plenty of time for the shuttle bus to the start. Met up with a few other runners on the platform, get chatting, the display reads ‘1st train: 8:14 Reading, on time’. Marvellous.
It’s still saying that at 8.16am. Fellow-runner #1 gets out his phone and checks the trains app. ‘It says it’s running 26 minutes late on this’, he says. Slight consternation, but we agree that 9am arrival probably still gives us enough time, though it will be tight.
It’s at that point, silently, with no accompanying announcement, that the display changes to read: ‘1st train: 9:14 Reading, on time’. W. T. A. F.?
Mr Iron Mum is at home with slumbering children, one of them not ours – I prepare to go back, haul them all out of bed and get them to drive me to the start line. But kindly fellow-runner on platform does the noble thing, takes three of us along with him, drops us at Green Park and drives bravely off to find somewhere, anywhere, to park. I never saw him again: hope he isn’t still driving around the mean streets of Reading.
By this time I can’t see properly. My lenses – even though I cleaned them REALLY WELL last night to avoid this very situation – are fogging up. Fellow runner in car tells me she had her eyes lasered 3 years ago. ‘Best thing I ever did’, she asserts, ‘I could see the difference pretty much immediately’. I wonder if there’s time to stop off and have surgery en route. Probably not.
When we get to the race village I stop off at St Johns Ambulance and beg some saline wash to clean the lenses: slight improvement. I head to the Lucozade tent to meet my running buddy as arranged except, oh no, no Lucozade tent this year. And he’s not bringing his phone as he wants to ‘travel light’ (srsly? How heavy would your phone have to be before you could say it had slowed you down in a race??) and although I stand hopefully at the left-hand side of several other tents I fail to meet him.
This is not going well. The omens are poor, I can’t help thinking as I trail down to the start line behind a pack of Wallys. (This did make me laugh: I remember somebody describing watching a marathon and trying to spot ‘their’ runner as a 3-hour game of Where’s Wally, there were at least 10 of them today so hopefully the crowds in Reading had some success spotting Wally.)
But then, it all turns around. I catch up with a Fetchie friend, last seen supping tea and munching cake at our house after the Bramley 10. She is also aiming for sub-2. I am in a thermal top, a t-shirt and a bin liner and I am still shivering slightly; she is wearing a Fetch vest and shorts. She is clearly nailz, and I am a wuss. She still talks to me though, which is nice, and we do the first 3 miles or so together before a shorts-related major wardrobe malfunction stops her in her tracks and I have to go on alone. (I will say no more, other than that the solution involved vaseline.)
I am a bit lonely for a while, but then the rhythm of the run takes over and I realize how much I am enjoying myself. The Reading crowds are just amazing, there’s music, cheering, jelly babies, saucepans being banged, several groups of drummers (most impressively in the underpass, where the thundering beat lifts the hairs on the back of my neck), and one incredible small oriental man literally jumping up and down by the side of the road in a martial arts kind of way making noises somewhere between a kiai and a cheer. He must have been exhausted after a couple of hours of that. I see chalked messages on the road ‘You can do this’, ‘Enjoy yourself’, and then a hopeful hopscotch chalked out which I decide against but which makes me laugh out loud. A church is out singing hymns, the pub is offering beer, random strangers are shouting my name and every time they do I feel a little bit stronger.
All this time I am running through a pea-souper because my contact lenses are such a mess. I can see people but they are soft-focus. It’s like running in a dream.
Around mile 8 I am flagging, but then I see one of the Bramley Trail Runners cheering me on and almost immediately after that a shout of ‘Oi Fetchie’, and the bad bit is over and I know I can do this. It won’t be a pb but if I can keep to 9 minute miles or so it’ll be comfortably under 2 hours, which was the aim. I am thinking of my friend Helen who would give anything to be running this with me but can’t – she’s injured – and I tell myself to man up and run it for her.
By mile 11 I am reduced to counting steps. I know I’ll finish, but there’s not much left in the tank. I’ve not run this far since last year’s VLM. The switchback just before the stadium doesn’t get me down too much this year, I know it too well, and I get a lift seeing HOD running well on the other side just before he turns into the stadium. Pretty soon I’ll be on that side, and the poor sods on this side will be looking at me wishing they were me, I think, and sure enough pretty soon I am and they are.
1000m to go, and I wonder if I can maybe take the pace up a notch. I try, but nothing much seems to happen. But now I can hear the roar of the stadium, I’m still counting my steps up the rise but it doesn’t feel so hard, and then suddenly there it is, I’m flying down the slope and into the stadium, I’m grinning like a loon and waving my arms in the air, and then sprinting like a child down that finishing straight. 1:58:34, perfectly average, but I’m perfectly happy with that. Ran all the way, enjoyed it immensely, no niggles or injuries, steady pace, perfick. Do some stretching, take in the atmosphere in the stadium, a stranger takes pity on me trying to do a selfie and takes possibly one of my favourite ever race pics, sadly with his fat thumb in it but never mind.

Stadium-tastic!

And then there’s the friend I lost at mile 3 again, so I head out with her in companionable debriefing chatter as we pick up our medals and space blankets and goodie bags (GREAT medal, btw), and I find the shuttle bus and make it to the station just in time for the Bramley train, and get home to bacon sandwich and mug of tea or three and a hot bath. 

And tonight there was wine, and lots of it. Hic.