This will be one of those boring posts where everything is, for now anyway, going okay. Why is it that I find it so much easier to write about my running (or anything else) when it is all going wrong? I’d try to find something funny to say about the 2025 Brighton Half Marathon but to be honest I would be clutching at straws. Maybe I could mention nearly getting stuck in Bognor Regis the previous day or the water station at nine miles where I tried to drink out of a cup with no bottom, but in all honesty I would be clutching at straws. It was just a perfect day. The sun glinted off the sea. I sang along with Taylor Swift. I started with the 2:15 pacers and kept up all the way, speeding up at the end to finish in 2:13:26, nearly twenty minutes faster than last year. To think of all those years I spent looking at my 2016 2:35:26 finish thinking that I would never get back to those golden days of being front-of-the-back-of-the-pack. Now I am firmly back-of-the-middle. Even verging on middle-of-the-middle sometimes. Have you ever heard anyone say “it doesn’t get easier, you just get faster?” I’m here to tell you that this is a complete lie, I think anyone who genuinely believes that to be true started at a baseline where it was already easy and faster is the only way you can go. When your legs feel like your own and the crowds look at you without a hint of pity… just the fact that there actually still are crowds by the time you get to the finish. It is so much easier. Remember that next time you pour scorn on a slow runner, because a 3:13 is so much harder than a 2:13. Unfortunately I can’t report on whether a 1:13 is easier still, but keep watching this space.
The first downside of encroaching on averageness is that you get shit photos because everyone is in your way and you are moving too fast. This was the best I got and I had to photoshop some giant lump out of it. I am even worse at photoshop than Princess Kate so there appears to be a monkey and an alien with a hole in its face in the crowd.
The other downside of encroaching on averageness is that there is always the call of your former self. The tap on the shoulder saying “this isn’t really you, and soon someone will be here to show you back to where you really belong”. It will be six weeks until the Hamburg Marathon on Sunday, and those of you who care about this sort of thing will remember that was precisely the point where my Yorkshire Marathon training came undone, limping round the Surrey Half in 3:11 with a torn calf. The Surrey Half takes place again this Sunday; I will not be partaking. In fact I will not be running this weekend at all. Just in case.
7:07 