It’s nice to get off the Internet for a couple of days and explore the world as it used to be, so that’s what I decided to do over the past couple of days. No mobile devices for me, just five days in the wilderness where I’ve been trying to avoid bumping into people with headphones on and brains off.
The location for my trip back into time was Edinburgh Scotland, and the reason for my being there was to run their half marathon. The rest of this article will be a race report, but before I dive into the details I’ll quickly sum up my experience of the city of Edinburgh.
It’s very hilly, so if you ever visit be sure to wear a decent pair of walking shoes, because after hiking around for an hour or two you’ll have achy breaky feet and be looking for the nearest pub to put them up for a bit. Don’t worry about finding a pub though, the place is full of them. Pubs and blokes in kilts actually. The two go together as the kilt wearing blokes are on stag does and looking to be all manly by getting drunk with a bunch of their similarly attired skirt wearing buddies.
Of course you are more likely to bump into the kilt-wearing drunks during the early evening. During the day you’ll find yourself being engulfed in waves of foreign tourists looking for tartan scarves and Loch Ness monster souvenirs, two things that I immediately acquired for myself of course.
I won’t bore you too much with the weather. It’s Scotland, so it rains, a lot. You get a bit of sun as well, but Scotland is very green, so very wet as well. Just bring a brolly and don’t moan about it.
Here’s the race report then:
You start off in what they worryingly call ‘pens’ depending upon the race time you have predicted for yourself. I thought I would do it in about 1:50. So I started off in the Green pen with a load of other runners. Just before the race it started to rain, a lot. Why does it always rain on me? Because you’re in Scotland mate, so I put on a bin-bag and got wet with everybody else.
The official race beginning was about ten minutes delayed from where I was standing, so after a bit of a wet wait I slowly shuffled past the start line with everybody else in the Green pen, started my stopwatch and set down to running down a wet street and trying to get into some kind of rhythm. This was actually a lot of fun, as there was a kind of released from jail/tribal feeling of euphoria as we began to run through the now closed off streets of Edinburgh, past the shops and pubs that we had been dodging traffic to get to earlier on in the day and week. I spent this part of the race running past people, and I kind of assumed that I’d quickly join a pack of runners where I would settle into some kind of rhythm for the race. That didn’t happen though, and for most of the race I would be dodging, weaving and accelerating past people. A few people overtook me as well, but it wasn’t many and I found that to be a bit surprising. You normally get into individual races with people in runs, but not in this one. I was part of the crowd of runners, but tribal feelings put to one side for the moment, I was really just running by myself for the entire race.
After the first mile I saw a sign and assumed that the rest of the course would be similarly sign posted, distance wise. I was wrong, it wasn’t. The next sign I saw was at ten miles. Before that though came a long and enjoyable run down the seafront where I took in the sights as best as I could before getting worried about my time and putting my head down to try and do some serious running.
The serious running portion of my race moved into a tough running portion at the ten-mile mark when I saw that sign and thought, ‘Oh, I better get moving then, only three and a bit miles to go.’ So that’s what I did. I went into 5k mode and started to accelerate past even more runners. In this last three miles or so of racing I wasn’t overtaken by anybody. I was tiring, but knowing the finish was coming I ignored the tiredness and sang happy black metal tunes in my head as I angrily thundered down the streets looking for that finish line.
That finish line took what seemed like a bloody age to come, and at the end I was getting pretty fed up of not seeing it. I shouted at a bloke standing on a corner watching the race, ‘How long to go?’ and he was kind enough to let me know, ‘About a mile.’
After hearing this I forced more acceleration into my legs and saw that the crowds lining the streets were increasing in number, indicating that the finish was getting close. Finally I saw the big FINISH barrier, checked my watch and saw that I might not make it to my under 1 hour 50 minute target, so for the last three hundred metres or so I went into a full sprint, passing other tired sprinters as I finally finished in a time of 1 hour 49 minutes and 51 seconds. YES, I made it, with nine seconds to spare, so punched the air in a private celebration as the indifferent crowds around me chuckled in mild amusement.
So that was that. My first half marathon, done and I managed to do it in the time I had been training for. I probably could have done it faster, but the crowds of runners bottlenecked at places forcing me to slow down, and there was a lack of mile markers to give me an idea of how well I was doing. I finished well and I loved the tribal feeling at the beginning of the race as we were running like newly freed prisoners from our pens. The last three miles was difficult, and it rained a lot, but that’s what I was expecting anyway.
Now I’m back in my plugged in and tuned out routine of daily Internet news and reviewing everything that passes by my orbit, and this is the first review since my return. Next I’ll get onto the comics and other stuff that I stupidly obsess over. I found some pretty decent independent comics in Edinburgh from a local publisher called Black Hearted Press, but I’ll talk about that later on my blog. It was nice to unplug for a while. It’s probably something I need to do more often, and so I will. A few days a month I think. I’ll find stuff to do. It’s a big world and it doesn’t need to hear me moaning about it on a daily basis.
