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Forest of Dean Half Marathon - Edward Collier + Photos by Richard Read - March 2010

Jean Bryan and John Bailey at the start of the event.

The omens were not good. On the Tuesday before the Forest of Dean Half I took the ill-advised decision to do some interval training, but on the fifth rep something "pinged" at the top of my thigh, just below my ... ahem ... buttock. My hamstring, I think. I hobbled back to get changed, and took the (for me) unprecedented decision to stop running until it got better. Or until Sunday, the day of the race, whichever came first. I told The Boys (13 and 11) that I'd injured myself. "Where?" they asked, avidly, gory little monsters that they are. "Well," I said, "my bottom". Anyone who has boys can imagine the gales of laughter - "Daddy's broken his bottom!" they chortled. I don't foresee a career in the caring industry for either of them.

Come the day, come the bottom. It was fine, people. As was the weather. As was the sat-nav, which delivered me to the race (unlike the last time I ran the FoD Half, when I schlepped up and down the A40 convinced that the turning was "somewhere along here".) I clocked a collection of the usual AA suspects near the start, smiling at the sun and all blissfully unaware or uncaring of the pain to come.

A creature of habit, I found myself as I usually do in the queue for the rather dismal collection of Portaloos about quarter of an hour before the start. As time went on, several men (and women, too) left the queue and decamped into the woods to make like bears. This was not an option for your correspondent. Then I noticed a couple who had moseyed up to the queue just beside where I was standing (about twenty places from the front, with at least double that number behind me). They did some pantomime stretching but I knew their game - queue jumping. Sure enough, as we all moved forward so did they, still pretending that they were flexing their quads, though they didn't quite have the chutzpah actually to elbow in and join the queue properly. Not for nothing did I always hanker to be a policeman. "Excuse me", I said, probably rather louder than I intended owing to my new custom-made, noise-reduction, in-ear headphones, "the back of the queue is over there." The man looked as guilty as hell and bang to rights, but blustered anyway. "What are you talking about - we've been queuing all this time, we joined at the back." "No you didn't," I replied, "I joined at the back and you weren't in front of me". It didn't help their cause that they were quite distinctive - both very tall, and wearing very bright clothes. They didn't argue, but then they didn't slope off either, though they did have the good grace to fall in behind me. I suspect I was later awarded the honorary title of Most Uptight Man Waiting For Lavatory. To make matters worse, when I was only two from the front a cubicle became free and the woman in front of me went forward to claim it, when suddenly from nowhere a man ran past her and stole her stall. If you're going to queue-jump, that's probably the way to do it. I saw the same man later in the race and tried to trip him up but he was a bit too quick for me.

Enough of the preliminaries. Pre-race preparations completed, we all lined up in the cool sunshine. Without really meaning to I found myself somewhat nearer the sharp end than usual, but it was too late to go to the back as the gun went (or the shout). The first section was delightful - we were on a real road, a blessed lump of God's own tarmac, and I was in my racing flats (having listened to an announcement earlier that road shoes would be fine.) No sooner was I in my comfort zone, however, than we turned off into the woods, onto yucky mud and I had about as much grip as Lewis Hamilton slipstreaming behind Fernando Alonso. The mud then went the way of all mud, to be replaced by a rough gravel path that was heading down, down, down, as if into the depths of Hell itself. My time at the first mile marker was 6min 15sec, and at four miles was 25mins. We're going to pay for this later, I thought to myself, since what goes down must come up, unless they've installed travellators on the uphill sections (see Chedworth Race Report).

They hadn't. Having descended almost to Australia, the route started climbing and, while none of the hills was as steep as some at Chedworth, they were all pretty relentless, with plenty of false horizons, each giving false hope. Terrible thing, hope. It struck me again how oddly uninteresting a race it is - the problem with such a heavily managed forest is that the sightlines tend to be straight, and the trees rather regimented. Which means that the only variable is the gradient. And we don't like gradient, do we children?

But it was nice and quiet, and the trees protected us from any wind, and there were a surprising number of enthusiastic spectators. Ok, so I'll admit it - it was a good race; are you satisfied now? I actually enjoyed it, up to a point (that point being about 7 miles), especially when it wasn't too muddy, and the path wasn't strewn with ankle-turning boulders. Road shoes were a good call, though I probably went off too fast at the start. By the end I was struggling and supremely glad to see the finish. I tried looking on the results for Almost Athletes but it's a pretty lame results service as you can't search by club. I note from the website, however, that Karen Galpin and Ingrid Harris were 2nd and 3rd FV45, which is a great result, with neither very far behind the winner in that category. As I was walking, or rather hobbling, away I thought I heard Duncan Mounsor saying he'd run a PB, but that hardly seems likely - in retrospect I think he must have said he'd won a freebie, or done a heebie, or even that he was Son of BB. But not a PB, not on that course, no way.