Perfect running conditions, pacers and a friendly vibe made this seaside city race a fun one to take part in for Leo Spall.
Fun Factor
In a word: high. It wasn’t a quirky, laugh-out-loud race with comics lining the route with witty messages and notices, but the vibe was really friendly.
There was good support most of the way around, plenty of friendly chat in the starting pens and I didn’t come across any overly-officious race staff.
"There were plenty of kids hoping for high fives too, which is always a good sign."
The brilliant sunny day might have helped, but it didn’t even feel like anyone was taking themselves too seriously when the course was congested (the downside of a bigger race) either.
I had my name on my vest from a few years ago for a 26.2 mile-effort and got lots of shouts of support from people I didn’t know. There were plenty of kids hoping for high fives too, which is always a good sign.
How was it for Loo?
Not amazing. The organisers’ pre-race info warned that you can never have enough PortaPotties for big races and it's hard to argue with that.
Nonetheless, the race announcer said there were 12,000 entrants in the weekend’s activities, and the results pages showed 7,406 finishers for the half (there were also wheelchair, relay and children’s races). That is a lot of people for the smallish clusters of toilets I saw near the start area.
The queues, as runners who race have come to expect, were long, but if you got there early enough you could use the facilities; I suppose that’s the lesson everyone learns. I got there about an hour before the start and had time to line up - those cutting it fine may well have been caught short!
Bling: Fiddy Cent or Tuppence Ha’penny?
If Fiddy was rating this gong, he’d probably allow it In Da Club. A nice bright lanyard led to a big, chunky medal that was maybe a little understated but looked good. The race was sponsored by the Grand Hotel, so I suppose it was never going to be full-on Fiddy.
I know I’m far from the first to notice this, but the growing size of medals over the last few years has been amazing.
Brighton Half’s medal won’t compete with the biggest and boldest, but it’s a nice one to have in the collection.
Good Grub or Cruel Gruel?
Decent. After getting your medal, being offered water and a foil blanket, it seemed that was it. I initially figured there was no grub in the finish chute because none was visible and saw loads of people duck out without making it to the goodie bag area.
However, if you stuck with it and followed most of the crowd for what seemed a long way, you were rewarded with plentiful but standard fare. There were bananas, muesli bars, yoghurt raisins, gels from the nutrition sponsor and water.
What was good at the finish, and on the course, was the water came in clearly recyclable containers. The water and sports drinks during the race were in compostable cups and the post-run water was in cans. The goodie bags were entirely paper, too. A big green tick for the race (assuming all the cans were separated after they were binned!), from me.
The announcer underlined the race’s environmentally-friendly approach repeatedly and Brighton was way better than some, but I’d like to see more done on this. How about having lots of appropriate bins for recycling at the end?
There could be food waste containers for all the banana skins (and not just so I wouldn't have to take mine home ;) ), for example, rather than many heading for landfill, and if anyone can provide muesli bars or similar in cardboard or paper containers rather than plastic wrappers, I’d be an even happier runner.
Flat Stanley or Humpty Dumpty?
My Garmin showed 198 feet of elevation on the route as I took it, and that’s great. There were a couple of inclines and declines early on but that was pretty much it.
The course went mostly along the seafront, with a deviation into the area known as The Level somewhere in the middle, and that pretty much tells its own story.
Some might have wanted it even flatter – pancake like – but I appreciate a little bit of undulation to keep it interesting and work the muscles differently. The winner came through in 64:56 so it wasn’t exactly a slow course!
Fabulous feedback in the sunshine: Leo's race story
The question I always ask to establish whether a race is good or not is the obvious one: would you run it again?
My answer for Brighton was an unequivocal yes. The big-race-but-relaxed feel was a winner, and it helped that things went to plan too.
"It would have been hard to come away feeling anything but upbeat about the Grand Brighton Half Marathon"
I was using the race to get some feedback on my training as this was my first marathon-pace run of note as I built towards the London Marathon.
My Happy Running approach focuses on resilience, longevity and fun, with race specificity coming relatively late in the build to an event. Other coaches embed specificity early on and it can work well, but I found it led to boom and bust on the injury front and too few smiles along the way.
This race would help tell me what shape I was in and one of the attractions was the presence of pacers to make it that bit easier. I sat with mine the whole way around, finding it helped rein me in early on and push me forward at the end. As a result, I ran a very evenly-paced race and kept hitting target mile splits long after the point at which I thought I would run out of steam.
That was a big win for me and my brilliantly-supportive wife and, in perfect, bright running conditions, an athlete I had running the race achieved all her targets, too, and finished with a winning smile.
It would have been hard, therefore, to come away feeling anything but upbeat about the Grand Brighton Half Marathon. Not exactly an objective judgement maybe, but I genuinely got the feeling that it was a nice race, with runners helping others across the line, lots of charity money raised and the colourful seaside city at its best.
If you are thinking of entering this or any other race, we can help with regular training planning and guidance. Happy running!
The Grand Brighton Half Marathon took place on February 24, 2019. Details of the 2020 race will be listed here.
留言