Hadrians Wall Half Marathon - A beginners´ guide

Living in Tromsø, I guess the easiest way to start a half-marathon-career, is to participate in the Midninght Sun Marathon (MSM). MSM offers a very flat road track. And since it probably is one of the easiest half-marathons in Norway to run, it must be a good place to start.

I guess I never had the gift of doing things the easy way. Instead of running the half marathon at MSM on the 20th of June, I opted for the 10 kilometer at MSM, as a warm up excercise to the the much more challenging Hadrians Wall Half Marathon on the Scottish border eight days later. Hadrians Wall Half Marathon was described as a much tougher experience than MSM, with a couple of rather steep hills to climb and a mixture beetween tarmac road, field and forestry roads.

Looking fresh: Harder times
was just around the corner.  

The race itselfs starts a few kilometers north of Haltwhistle. It starts and finishes on a hill, and it was some sight to see 250-300 cars and around 10 privys spread out on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere (ok, there was a single-track-road and three or four houses a few hundred meters away). The atmosphere was very relaxed. The start of the race was delayed nine minutes because a long que of participants where stuck in the cue to the privys. You won´t see that at London Marathon!

As I had very little running experience from before, only having done a few stints at 10k runs during the last three or four years, my ambition was simple: to finish the race. I had been running four times a week the last five weeks before the race, but in general I spend most of the time in the sofa or in the pub. To make matters even worse, I am also overweight.

This years race had a very gloomy weather forecast, but we experienced more sun than rain on the day. It rained around 20 minutes in the last half of my half-marathon (the top shelf runners had already finished by then), but in general it was less of a trail race than expected.  The track includes around 7 kilometers of road with tarnac, 5 kilometers of  grass (field) and the rest is forestry track. Not so challenging at first glance. Even though, the rain that had been falling the hours before we started made the uphill grass and forestry sections a real challenge for an overweight runner like myself.

I was travelling and running with my father-in-law, who is an experienced marathon- and half-marathon-runner. I had a secret plan of finishing less than half an hour after him, but I missed out on that with a few seconds. He finished the light MSM half-marathon in 1:44, and used 2:07 at Hadrians Wall. I guess my finishing time of 2:37 shows that I could manage under 2 hours at a lighter half marathon after a longer period of  systematic training. At least that is my pipe dream!

Although the race all in all was very well organized, there was a small negative surprise waiting for me after the finish. When I entered the race in May, I clearly wrote that I wanted an XL-finisher t-shirt (as there was no XXL to choose from). Unfortunately, there were no more XL t-shirts left when the third last male contender crossed the finishing line. This means that I am now walking around looking like a stuffed sausage in my small (but beautifull) Hadrians Wall Half Marathon T-shirt.

A daylight nightmare:  Half
marathon organizers running out of XL-stock !

Even though this was my hardest physical challenge ever, I would recommend this race to everyone that has a bit of experience in running longer distances. Myself, I have been lacking the slighest of talent or stamina to even think of running a half marathon. My lack of form and talent didn´t prevent me from enjoying the beautifull cultural landscape that is rarely seen in England. To run in the landscape close to the Roman wall is so much more rewarding than running at city roads where most half marathons these days are organized. Although the Hadrian Wall itself can only be seen from a distance at a few points in the beginning of the race, the fields, forests and stone walls of the area makes the effort well worth it.