After the disappointment that was the Wilmslow Half, I looked around for another Half I could do to have a stab at a better time. The only one that I found that I could do was the Birmingham Half in October. I finished in 1.47, a 9min PB over Wilmslow (although not quite as quick as I’d like, I still want to get under 1.45 as a minimum for 2011).

The organisation was a bit crap. Everyone had coloured bibs to denote your starting area, and predicted finish time, but the pens weren’t segregated, and there were no marshalls to ensure you went into the right pen, so there were a lot of very slow runners down at the front. Also, the start/finish line was poorly sited, which meant that immediately after the start (and the finish) you had to funnel down from a 4 lane road, to a 2 lane road. Obviously this caused a lot of congestion at the start, but even more so at the finish, where some of the slower runners had to queue for up to 10mins to cross the finish line! Fortunately I missed most of the congestion, and ran a pretty good race, it was the never ending hills at the end that robbed me of my sub 1.45 time :-)

I had a disappointing start to 2010, with a poor Wilmslow Half marathon time. Things brighten up in May, with a very quick 5K at the Reebok Manchester May Day 5K, culminating in a 3min 10K pb time of 45:28 at the Great Manchester 10K.

The course was nice and flat, although it did go past The Swamp, with some very good runners setting some impressive times.