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Cheltenham Circular Footpath Half Marathon Race Report by Edward Collier - June 2010

The race - well, is it a race? More correctly it's a time trial. Circular? The circularity of the route is comparable to what you'd get if a right-handed seven year-old were given a large shot of gin and asked to draw a circle left-handed while the aeroplane she was travelling in turned upside-down in the kind of turbulence that ended up with the sixth season of "Lost" on Sky 1.

When the Cheltenham Roughly-Circular Footpath was opened in 1996 I ran it (not in one go - I'm not mad, if you don't mind) and decided that the best bits were to be found in the section that begins in Glenfall Way travelling clock-wise up and down the hill to the A40 London Road, across and then up through Lineover Wood, across the top of Wistley Hill joining onto the Cotswold Way at Seven Springs, thence to Leckhampton Hill, with the good bit ending at Daisy Bank Road. Okay, the next mile or so is fine, but once you get to the bottom of the hill by Leckhampton Church the route gets a bit flat and, well, boring. And dangerous, to which I'll return later.

Sunday was forecast good, and so most canny runners went off early. I'm not that canny, or more truthfully after a week of getting up early I felt like a bit of lie-in on Father's Day, so I finally had my card stamped at the start at 0902. As someone who quite often misses the beginning of races owing to poor bowel management, I found the idea of leaving at my convenience (pun intended) rather welcome. The other difference from normal races is that there isn't anyone to race against, unless you set off with a large group of other runners. You only come upon other people racing if they're slower than you - faster runners are long gone. So I started in a straggling line of mostly walkers.

There can't be many people reading this who haven't run on at least part of this route. If you haven't then get yourself a map and get out there - it's fabulous. Well, apart from the second half, which I've only done once and can't say I'm in any hurry to do again. The other participants - the occasional runners, but mostly walkers - were unfailingly polite, recognising that the sudden sound of wheezing coming up behind them betokened a soon-to-explode runner, and jumped out of the way sharpish. Unfortunately for me this also happened going up the steps in Lineover Wood, where I was really banking on some obdurate souls walking two abreast behind whom I myself could also walk, able (almost) to convince myself that I couldn't safely get past (it's very steep) and that I couldn't reasonably ask "excuse me" as it would just not be in the spirit of the thing to be in too much of a hurry. Why else be in a club called "Almost" Athletes? As it happened, a long line of helpful ramblers stood to one side as I attempted to run up the vertiginous ascent without the use of bottled oxygen.

Enough cavilling. It was a lovely day to be alive, though I only saw one other AA en route. I bumped into Ange Sadler (renowned Tewkesbury AC ultra runner) at the first checkpoint, for whom the race was presumably a short trot. By the time I got to the bottom of Leckhampton Hill by the church Brizen was in my nostrils, and my legs were telling me that they were just about to chuck in the towel.

Which is where it got dangerous. Turning off Church Road back onto the footpath, the route leads into a copse where, despite taking off my sunglasses, I didn't spot the huge hole in the path into which my right leg went without further ado. Whack! I landed in the dirt on my left knee and elbow, whereupon I swore, loudly and lustily. At this particular point in the route there were very few people about, so after a minute lying there wondering if I'd broken anything (skin yes - bones no) I picked myself up, dusted myself down and hobbled off. I'd twisted my left ankle but, as I normally find with sprained ankles, after a mile or so it stops hurting.

I handed in my card at Brizen having taken something like 1h 55m to run what was alleged to be a half marathon (at the time of writing there don't appear to be any results available). According to the literature there was supposed to be a bus shuttle service back to the racecourse, but the organisers didn't know where it was or when it would arrive, so I thought I might as well run there. Well, it's not far.

Big. Mistake. It's actually nearly four miles, which made this in aggregate the longest run for me since the London Marathon in 2007, and one for which I was pretty ill-prepared. By the time I sat down to Father's Day lunch (barbequed chicken, new potatoes, three different kinds of salad with Baked Alaska for pudding, as I'm sure you wanted to know) I was done in. A long afternoon snoozing fitfully was my just reward. Will I have recovered in time for my leg of the Cotswold Relay on Saturday? My only consolation is that I'm running against Duncan Mounsor, who ran the whole Cheltenham Child's-Wobbly-Circle-On-A-Map Footpath, all 26 miles of it. Chances are his legs feel even worse than mine.