I ran into a few things I wasn’t expecting Sunday morning as I joined 8094 others to race the super calm seafront of Brighton (okay – reasonably calm). I learnt a few things on those 13.1 miles too, here’s a few;
- The sheer amount of people running is incredible, picture 8000 people following each other fast on foot… you can’t really (at least all at once). I hadn’t given the scale of it any thought before so it really caught me by surprise.
- There was a guy stood on his fourth floor balcony serenading the streets and passing runners with his trumpet, this isn’t totally unexpected in Brighton but it caught me by surprise at 9:15AM.
- There’s a weird self consciousness that you get running through the narrow sections, so many eyes on you…
- SO MUCH CONFETTI ON THE START LINE.
- People love to support you, I was wearing the Vegan Runners club top and I must have heard “go vegan”, “go vegan runners” or just straight up “VEEYYYGUUNNN” shouted at least 10/ 15 times which was so unexpected (and great). I’ve never felt so much community between such a huge group.
- High-fiving kids along the way is cool, but try work out ahead of time if they’re actually holding out sweets for the runners along the way, slapping a jelly baby out of a kids hand isn’t a good look.
- It’s so hard not to get carried away with the rush from so much that’s going on around you, I finished 18 minutes faster than I planned (1:42 – STOKED) but with so many people running at different paces with different approaches you really need to keep checking yourself so you don’t burn out (don’t follow that guy because that guy might have no idea what he’s doing…). I planned for a negative split and kiiiiinda kept to it.
- Fancy dress is okay, a bride, a toilet, a zebra, a taco, it’s all okay.
- You can really get into that state of flow, the first forty minutes passed and I literally thought I’d been running for a quarter of that.
- About half way through there were a group hanging out of their apartment playing ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ horrendously loud for us all, I wonder if they had it on loop for hours or had a full playlist of cheesy/ motivational 80’s music.
- Half isn’t enough, I think I’m going to have to enter a full marathon soon.
Strava: https://www.strava.com/activities/504382085
(That awful pun is staying, no regrets and all that.)
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