There are different sorts of marathons around at the moment. Big city marathons, trail marathons, Long Distance Walkers Association events and low key marathons with few runners. The Royal Berkshire marathon was one of the latter, with a maximum of forty entrants. The race instructions were along the lines of:
There are no marshals at the turns, map and compass optional. If you turn right, you are lost. From the start proceed 100m along the red surface, follow the turn to the left, proceed 100m, follow the turn to the left. Repeat 104 and a bit times.
Yes, it was a track marathon. The advantages of such an event is that you always have the leaders in sight (which sounds impressive if you miss out the bit about the laps), you don't have to carry anything as there is a water station every 400m, it's flat and there is a good surface. The major disadvantage is that it could be very dull and that is what I feared the most. As it turned out, it wasn't dull at all, there was always somebody to talk to and I knew quite a few people there.
There were some very experienced marathon runners running and quite a few runners from the Brathay ten marathons in ten days round Windermere event, which is starting shortly. Both male winners from the last four years and one of the female winners were running. There was also a seventy three year old male who did the first ten in ten event and is doing it again this year.
The overtaking protocol wasn't what I had been expecting. We were asked to run on the white line on the outside of lane 1, so that overtaking runners could overtake on the inside (or the outside). One you had overtaken you were expected to return to the outside of lane 1. If runners were running with someone else they had to be further out than the outside of Lane 1. It seemed to work pretty well.
We had to have a human lap counter to count the laps for us and I can understand why, I totally lost track of how many laps I had done. I asked my lap counter (who was counting for someone else and kindly agreed to count for me as well) to let me know how many laps I had done every ten laps (we had to wave, smile, give the thumbs up to our lap counter every lap so that we weren't missed). At certain times I was just dying to hear her shout I had reached 70 or 80 or whatever. My halfway time was 2hr 5min and I got my hopes up of a very good time, but I slowed in the second half. Laps 60 to 70 were the worst for me. There was a bit of a breeze but it was only in our face in the home straight where you were concentrating on catching the eye of your lap counter, so I didn't notice it too much. I was very happy to finish with 4hr 23min.
There were a few fast runners there. The winner only asked if he do the event the night before and finished with 2hr 32min ! I am not sure yet whether I will do another track marathon, but it was certainly an interesting experience and it was a well organised event.
