Reading Half Marathon – March 2019

Nr Reading, 18 March 2018, 6:45 am

I dragged myself out of bed and looked out the window. The snow had continued to fall overnight and there was now a good inch and half on the ground. There was no way the Reading half marathon was going to be running today. I checked my phone and saw the confirmation from the organisers that it was off, along with a message from one of my mates that he was going to run it anyway. I wasn’t going to run if there wasn’t a medal at the end of it, so I told him he was mad, wished him good luck and crawled back into my warm bed for a snooze.

Nr Reading, 18 March 2018, 11:00 am

‘Have you seen this? The race organisers have said you can go in to the Madejski stadium and collect a medal!’ my wife exclaimed, waving her phone at me in excitement. I wasn’t excited, I was annoyed – I didn’t want a medal I didn’t earn, and my laziness that morning was now biting me in the bum; it would have been perfect to have done a run with a few hardy souls in the snow and pick up a medal as we finished. I wondered if there was a way I could pull things back; a quick check on google showed that our house was almost exactly 6 ¾ miles from the stadium – If I ran in, collected a medal and ran back I would have done A Reading half, if not the Reading half. Complicating things, five minutes earlier we’d booked a family trip to the cinema for a 1:30 screening – I didn’t have a lot of time.

I grabbed shoes and running gear and quickly got changed. It would turn out to be a miserable and lonely run on slippery and busy roads, but I made it back just in time for a quick shower and the movie.

Along with a lot of people after the snow driven cancellation last year, I had unfinished business with the Reading Half. There were a lot of angry people when they discovered the small print meant no refunds, and the late notice meant lots of runners had travelled and even booked hotels. I think the Reading team actually did a pretty good job of looking after us with a big money off voucher for running shoes from one of the event sponsors and a significant discount on a 2019 entry, but if I’m honest the PR damage was huge and this showed with what felt like lower numbers this year than the expected 15,000. You have to wonder how much it would cost for event organisers to secure insurance on top of the existing entry fee.

The weather was completely different for 2019 with lots of sunshine, although it was still pretty cold when the sun passed behind the clouds. Perfect running weather, really. I was luck enough to be chauffeured into one of the official car parks by Stu who was determined to finally break 2 hours at Reading – a race that had chewed him up and spit him out a couple of times in the past. I did idly wonder why – lots of friends had told me it was a good one, but hadn’t quizzed him too hard on this.

When we parked up we discovered half a dozen cars, a couple of angry runners and no shuttle buses. I did ask Stu if it was possible he’d received an email telling him to use a different car park, he did concede this was in fact a possibility, and when I went back and checked the race guide, it had been updated to that effect. The barriers weren’t opening at this point, so we couldn’t simply move the car – but it was only a mile or so to the race village, so we set off, chatting about a number of upcoming events.

Arriving at the race village, we could see the finishers of the green park challenge – a shorter family focused run – leaving the stadium wrapped in foil blankets and proudly clutching medals – there’s a great opportunity to include the whole family. It’s at this point that you realise that this is another huge scale run; moving into the race village there were two gigantic bag drop tents with a well organised one way system to shepherd people through.

At this point I noted a runner dressed as a helicopter raising money for Air Ambulances and a runner dressed as a lobster for no obvious reason. Instantaneously, not getting beaten by helicopter and lobster became my primary goal for the day.

I was not feeling that well, but just planned to run it off.

Before long we were starting the long walk to the start pens – each runner is allocated to a wave based on predicted finish times, and the colour coded waves each had a large pen. In our pen we could just about see the 2:00 pacer flag in one direction (in the picture above it’s the black speck with a slightly smaller white speck in the distance to the left of the central lamppost), and just about see 2:05 in the other (the same, but for the picture below, well further back than the paired green banners you can see) – there’s a lot of runners.

It has to be said, the system seems to work really well – for the first 10k everyone around me seemed to be moving at about the same pace and it was no problem running without having to dodge too many slower runners or walkers. We were able to hear the official race start but it was nearly twenty minutes later before we crossed the start line to begin our individual races.

I have had a lot of people tell me Reading is a flat, PB course. I think that may have been true in the past but is no longer the case as tweaks to the course have dropped in a fair few additional hills; even ignoring that from around the 2k mark to around 4k you are running up a fairly constant gradient into Whitley. There’s a false flat in there about halfway, but the second half gets gradually steeper until you are working quite hard as you get to the top.

There are a couple more parts of the course (a new part around the university, coming through the middle of town and particularly climbing back up to prospect park as you leave the center of town) where the gradients, while not huge, are not insignificant and go on for long enough to potentially hurt.

The one thing that really stood out to me was that the people of reading should be very, very proud of themselves. There were (clearly) official bands and choirs on the course and (equally clearly) unofficial versions of the same all adding equally to the atmosphere; as well as the official drinks stations (more on this later) there were at least four unofficial drinks stations where generous members of the public were handing out bottles of water direct from the boots of their car and I have never ever seen so many jelly babies and other pickmeups being handed out around the route;

One guy was literally grazing his way around the course in front of me; I’m pretty sure he weighed more when he finished than he did at the start.

On top of all of this, the support was relentless – Reading is one of those events where they print your name on your number so people can cheer you on – usually I get a huge lift from this but today I was struggling badly enough I really didn’t want or feel I deserved the encouragement. I do know it kept me running when I wanted to stop. There were literally people everywhere on the course, in some case on some of the steeper hills several deep and all were making a real effort to will on as many runners as they could by name.

Water stations were huge and well manned (the scouts did a fabulous job at the halfway point) with Lucozade on offer at two of them – the only problem I had with the organisation was that water pouches were used instead of bottles – although preopened, it’s not obvious how to use these, and the first go I had with one it initially refused to release any water so I squeezed harder and nearly choked myself as a fierce jet shot down my throat. Judging by the large numbers of virtually full discarded pouches I could see I was not the only one to struggle with how they work. If in use at future events, have a good look at the video, but bear in mind that for me at least, it wasn’t that simple and I’m still not entirely sure where the water was coming from.

I mentioned earlier I was struggling – I knew going in that I was under the weather but wasn’t really expecting it to impact on my run and intended to just push through it – but although I ran the first 10k at or around the expected pace I already could feel I was in trouble at this point and the wheels properly fell off. I think I had a fever and this had caused some unexpected dehydration overnight – I never managed to get back on top of hydration; although it wasn’t warm, it was sunny and the wind was brisk.

I missed my expected targets for the race by twenty minutes – so I still have unfinished business with the Reading half and I’m looking forward to going back in a year and showing those brilliant spectators what I can do when I’m running properly. 

After a slightly bleak 20th k along the closed side of the dual carriageway, the finish is fantastic – a short drag up to the stadium level, a jog around the back of the stadium and then a downhill slope that leads into the stadium proper where a lot of spectators are making a huge amount of noise as you cross the football pitch and sprint under the finish gantry. There’s then a reasonable walk out the other side of the stadium before collecting medal, water and goody bag containing branded water bottle and t shirt.

I did manage the tiniest acceleration for the finish, driven on by the crowd and the banks of official photographers getting the glory shot in the finish funnel. Stu had made it in and beaten his target some time ago – his business was done; except when he opened his goody bag he found one of the golden tickets that gave him free entry in 2020… Reading really seems to be one of those races that finds a way to make you go back.

I went past the helicopter at three k, and never saw him again. But the lobster took me out at 17k. I can’t let shellfish have the last word… Damn you Reading and see you next year.