Oulton Park Marathon 23rd November
I was persuaded by a good friend and fellow club member to give the marathon one more go to see out my 26.2 efforts for 2025. My confidence with the distance took a knock after Chicago and I agreed that an attempt at a redemption run could be a good idea. Well, it might be fine or it could be awful, but we agreed it didn’t matter either way and was worth a shot.
When I was presented with the idea of the oulton park marathon which is a lapped event around a motor racing track, I couldn’t think of anything worse (ok, maybe the A6) Lapped events like this aren’t my idea of fun and I was convinced I would hate it. However with 6 months of marathon training still in me, limited other race options and the kind offer of help with the extra 4 weeks of work, I decided to give it a go.
I turned up about 45 minutes before the go with my dad, who is a veteran of many marathons and was a pretty top class club runner in his day. We enjoyed a good chat on the way about his experiences in the 80’s before gels, electrolytes, garmin and carbon plates. Just a basic casio watch and a few swigs of lucazade saw him through. The towers of tubs of lucazade powder in the cereal cupboard as a child is one of my core memories. The chat was both insightful and kept my mind off the job at hand.
The event was quite low key organised by Run Through – surprisingly not many people fancied running a marathon round 10 laps of a race track in late November. However as I was to learn over the morning, the small scale nature of the event had many positives. First bonus was that I had the safety of the car just 50 meters from the start line. This meant I could escape the cold until the last minute, could take as much stuff as I wanted and had a nice empty car park to warm up in. It did fill
up later with multiple other distances on offer.
Obligatory forced group warm up over with, we were under way at bang on 9am. A short time into the lap there is a banked turn which was tricky to negotiate and after that I was presented with something I wasn’t expecting, a hill. Fine I said to myself, it was a 150m or so drag which did take a chunk out of me but I figured I could probably cope with 9 more. However just a few hundred metres later there was another, short but much steeper. This was not so straightforward to recover from and cruelly, there was a third right before the end of the lap. I was now regretting not actually looking at the course profile and clearly wrongly assumed it would be flat. No PB for me today I thought. My wonderfully enthusiastic dad, who has never been to see me run any of my marathons, was dashing around the course with great gusto, golf umbrella in hand, giving many cheers and words of encouragement as I ticked off the laps.
The weather was changing on a sixpence and at one point it got quite grim. With it being a race track it was quite open and the wind really picked up. I had kept really good pace and was feeling positive but by 14 miles I started to feel a bit battered, was struggling to recover from the effort of the inclines, my pace had gone awry and my legs were really, really cold. I had decided I was calling it a day on the next lap. This then turned into another lap and then when I was down to 8 miles to go and my dad appeared beaming and clapping at the top of the worst of the bumps, I figured I had to see it through.
Maths while running is not my strong suit but when I realised with 1.5 laps to go that if I could find a bit of pace, I could still go sub 4, I dug in. I came in to my dad’s delight and my relief in 3.57.
I actually really enjoyed the lapped format, there was something quite comforting about only being 2.6 miles from race hq. The lack of big crowds, music, charity cheer points and all the usual razzmatazz of a big event was quite therapeutic. As someone who can get quite overwhelmed by the above, I liked the peace and quiet of it. Just not the 1250ft of ascent!
I was pleased with the effort in the end, was glad to finish and learnt a thing or two in the process to take forward to the next one.
