“How’s your training going?” A coach asked me in the gym. I was confused – what training? Am I supposed to be training for something? Because… I haven’t been. My running is the same every week: two or three short runs and one long run. Sometimes I run up some hills, occasionally (very occasionally) I run a bit faster.
I haven’t been training because I haven’t been racing. I ran the St Neots half marathon in November 2024 and haven’t put on a club vest since. I really don’t miss it but I don’t want to feel like I’ve given up for ever, so I signed up for my annual race. The Clipston Trail Half’s description was perfect: ”run on trails across beautiful countryside”. Stiles, fields, views, hills, fewer than 100 entrants, no plastic waste, no time cut-off. My kind of race.
I ran with my brother-in-law, Lee, while my sister Liz did the five mile race. Half way through the run I was stood waiting for Lee to reappear after a trailside wee and a passing runner kindly asked if I was ok. Yes, I said, I’m just waiting for my… friend. I never thought about how weird it is to say “brother-in-law” to a total stranger. Especially when the brother-in-law isn’t present.
These are the kind of thoughts that have time to pass through a person’s head when they’re not worrying about how fast they are running. The week before the race, my friend Lee got injured, and I caught a cold. We should really have dropped out, but we agreed to “take it easy” instead. In my head this would be 9 minute miles, but the hills and my heart rate called for much slower, so we finished in 2 hour 20. The remarkable thing about this is not that it’s my slowest half, but that I didn’t even look at my watch until we were a mile away from the finish.
Running a race for the experience, rather than the time, is not something I have done often. Even if I’ve said I “just want to enjoy it” I’ve always had a secret goal. Not having one turns the race back into a run. It’s even allowed to be fun. We chatted. We walked. When a marshal said “don’t miss the view”, we really looked at it. I took pictures. I spotted birds. I ate two flapjacks and two gels and emptied my water bottle.
After the first hill there is a narrow footpath section where runners are forced to run in single file for half a mile. In any other race I would be frustrated to be stuck in a queue early on, so it felt good to remember all the times I’ve felt like that before and realise that this time I didn’t care. At mile four we settled in behind a trio of runners and, instead of wondering whether we could overtake them, I wondered whether we could keep them in front of us for the rest of the race.
It was a gorgeous race. The course is out and back with a couple of different loops and constant rolling hills (1,000 ft over the 13.1 miles) to keep it varied. The footpaths were dry and mostly gravel, firm grass or well worn single tracks, with only two ankle-breaking sections. The first was a deceptively beautiful wide path curving steeply down a hill which had been secretly churned up by horses and baked solid beneath a sward of grass. The second one we were warned about in the pre-race briefing: two ploughed fields in the final mile.
Knowing that you will have to walk in the final mile is enough to put anyone off aiming for a “good” time in a race. Even I would hesitate to call trudging up a hill of loose soil my idea of a “good time”. But after the furrows of doom there was a downhill of joy, and Lee leapt like a salmon for the photographer while I beamed in genuine delight. At the finish, people clapped like they knew us, and the Race Director greeted every finisher with a medal and a personal congratulations.
Walking back to the car with a flushed face and a paper plate of cakes I realised: this is the race I have been training for.
Not a Jogger 