Brathay Windermere marathon 2015

My ninth marathon here and eight years since my very first marathon which was at Brathay. I do love this event, although the route is far from easy with constant undulations and two big hills.

We started out for the Lakes very early on Saturday morning and did the Barrow parkrun. A new one for us and it turned out to be more hilly than we expected. We went a little too fast (my fault). Lovely park. We then watched the 10 marathons in 10 days runners go through Newby Bridge and Ambleside - they do the Windermere marathon course every day. We collected our race numbers and looked at the lovely view from the lawn, the weather was lovely on the Saturday

Melanie (her third marathon here) and I were a little nervous about the marathon as the last road marathon we did felt a long time ago - York last October. We have also not done much road training, so how would we do when trying to run most of a 26m route ? We decided that it would be nice to get under 5hr, but we thought we would be pretty close to that.

There were more Striders here this year than any other. It might be related to this event being in the Striders Grand Prix, but I think quite a few people just wanted to run it or do a race as a training run. The weather on the Sunday was overcast, dark and cold, not conditions I had encountered here before.This presented the usual 'What shall I wear' question. I went for a short sleeved top and my showerproof top. I was wearing my new Hoka Cliftons which I have only worn once before for the North Tyneside 10K. I felt great in them at that race and I loved them here as well - so light and great cushioning.

Not happy at being parked a 'long' way from the Hall...

We set off and found ourselves running at slightly less than 10 min/mile pace. A bit faster than we expected, but we thought we would see how long that lasted. Until at least halfway as it happened. Then we encountered the tricky third quarter undulations. That slowed us down a bit and we walked some of the uphills to try and preserve some energy for the last quarter. To my surprise I was feeling I had more energy than Melanie, which rarely happens. She told me to go on, but I wasn't confident that I could sustain the pace, so I played safe and took it easy in this section. When I finally did go on at about 18m, she caught me fairly quickly, so it seemed pointless and we ran together until 25m. I had earlier said that we could get under 4hr 30min and at 25m I was starting to struggle badly, so Melanie went on. As it turned out, we both made it with me 30sec behind her at the finish - 4hr 26min 50sec for me (and third in my age category !). Very unexpected.

It was great to see many other marathon runners I know and to see Foxy and Rents do the 10 marathons in 10 days event. Rents for the second time and Foxy for the sixth time, an amazing achievement !