Reflections on the Robin Hood Half-Marathon

The author with his medal

 

It was a misty day at the race village. I was immediately struck by the festival-like atmosphere, the place cluttered with people further than the eye could see – although this could have had something to do with the mist. “1,300 give or take”, I overhear. “And 1,000 of them doing the half”.

I entered the Nottingham Post Corporate Tent to meet the guys from my running club. However, unlike at a festival, I wasn’t hit with a cloud of cannabis smoke, but rather a funky, pungent guff of Deep Heat.

I decided it was best to visit the toilet before race time and so head outside, where the queue for the portables is absolutely absurd and overwhelms those for both the roast pork and hotdog stands by a generous mile. I went back into the marquee to join their wait for the bogs, which now doesn’t seem so bad. While there in the queue there was a level of intensity that prepared me for the race ahead: I watch attentively at the handles, waiting for that engaged red sign to flick to green as if I was on the grid at a grand prix.

At the start line, we’re ushered in like livestock between the metal fences. I look around and realise that I’m lurking toward the murky rear of the pack, in with the morbidly obese and the (probably) terminally ill. I make the tactical decision to shuffle forward, but I hit a wall of people with their earphones in listening to music and I’m unable to push past; the atmosphere’s like that of a silent disco, one of which I’m not part. I figure that anyone who has a gone out of their way to wear an armband which holds an iPhone must take running pretty seriously and thus decide that these are my people, the ones I will use to pace myself by.

However, there are so many people in front that I can’t see the start line. There’s a long wait, so I pass the time by counting the number of people I can spot dressed as Robin Hood (six) and judge the ability of the people around me on the basis of their appearance. As I do this I think to myself: “I’m gonna walk this… Well, not actually walk it, of course, but proverbially walk it”.

Route of Pain
 

The first hurdle was the water station at around the three-mile mark. People clearly hadn’t read the How to Open Water Bottles instruction guide PDF that was emailed to runners two weeks prior. “You’re meant to squeeze them”, one runner shouts. At that moment the person next to me squeezed it so hard that it exploded in their hands and all up in their face. Others who weren’t so confident admitted defeat and chucked the water bottles on the road beside them for people to tread on, squirting water up the legs of passing runners. (Okay, that one was me but I felt genuinely terrible for it. I swear afterward I heard a sort of squishing sound coming from an anonymous runner’s now water-filled shoes.)

Stretched out along every single yard of the course were supporters, each one either clapping or shouting “well done” or “keep going” – which was encouraging, and then tedious, and then encouraging again when I considered that they must have been clapping now for the best part of an hour, an activity no more pointless and tedious than the one I was doing. Occasionally there were people stood on the side of the road, arms extended in anticipation of a high- or low-five. Arbitrarily, some I would concede to and others I would extend my arm out only to quickly retract it at the last moment. 

From around the tenth or eleventh mile I start to see those fallen men and women – either sitting out from a tumble or a sprain, or those who had outright collapsed from exhaustion and were being taken care of by paramedics. It was devastating to see, and not because of their injuries: give them a Lucozade Sport and a Toffee Crisp and they’ll be fine. What was devastating to see as a runner was that these people were pushing the boundaries of their mental and physical capabilities only to fail at the final stretch.

At this stage in the race, many people were walking. The paradox of walking in a half-marathon is that it is in a sense harder. Indeed, the problem with walking at any point of a long run is, firstly, that it’s harder to get going again and, secondly, your body has time to realise it’s in pain. Using this sort of perverse logic, my housemate jokingly advised me before the race that “the quicker you do it, surely the easier it is, because you get it over with quicker.”

After the race I shambled down to the Major Oak in town and treated myself to a much deserved, cool and refreshing pint of post-race Carlsberg (because it tends to be the cheapest tap larger). It not only tasted awful. Because of the extremely salty sweat around my lips, it made me feel terribly sick. Regardless, I push on through my pint and reflect on my run (cue internal monologue). It’s times like this that one is reminded of just how special a city Notts is: community-centred and downright beautiful.