Great day out racing today!
An early start, aided by my new Spotify playlist that collects all my favourite running-reminiscent songs! After getting our stuff together, Geth and I headed out for a good walk to the Great North Run start line. We put our rucksack on the baggage bus and got ourselves settled in the start pen.
It was a good hour-long wait until we finally started moving, and probably another twenty minutes after that walking down to the actual start line (being the world’s biggest half marathon, it takes a good long while to get nearly 60,000 runners over the line), but before too long we were off, and I was able to settle into my comfortable pace for the first few miles.
Unfortunately pretty much all of my recurring aches and pains showed up during the course of the race, and so I didn’t get anywhere near the sub-2:30 I would have liked. I did get 2:43:19, which is a 10 min 36 sec improvement on last year’s PB – ergo I can’t really complain! Looking forward to the winter, though, as I will be able to train a lot better for the various races I will be doing in the run-up to the London Marathon in April.
South Shields and its pubs were as wonderful and necessary as ever. We hung about for a while to avoid the Metro queues, but are now finally home with pizza and prosecco. A very quiet day planned tomorrow.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Ashford & Simpson – Solid
(Another short playlist due to a whole day of having music played at me!)