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Cardiff Half-Marathon
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Hello all
Had a great day yesterday..set off from Swansea at 6.00am, got to Cardiff just after 7.00am and managed to park in a long stay place £3.50 for 10 hours. Loved the course and the support and ran a PB! Got very cold afterwards waiting in bag queue for nearly a hour, but that's my only gripe.
lots of fab PBs going on out there. well done everyone!
i made it (thanks to a kind soul who saw my post on here re: parking and offered me a lift) and got round in 1:58, so i was happy enough, given that i only really started training properly in august after having number 2 (she is now 7 months old). my PB is 1:48 (but that is tour of torfaen, so not sure that really counts!).
i would echo what a lot of people have been saying - water stations hard to spot and if i hadn't been running with the 2 hour pacer for the first 8 miles, i would have missed them.
also the goody bag was frankly sh1te. can't believe we paid all that money to enter and there was no memorabilia other than a medal. not that i'm desperate for more t-shirts, but basically it was full of freebies which were utterly useless for a woman!! one granola bar which tasted like sawdust because by the time i got to eat it, i had already drunk my bottle of water so had nothing to wash it down with.
useless.
and the baggage pick up.
i would do it again, but a few tweaks (and a better goody bag) could make it an excellent half!
a question on pacers - i ran with the 2 hour guy up until 8 miles. when i looked at my garmin afterwards, his mile splits were very consistent (8:52, 8:53 etc), but within the miles, we were doing all sorts of paces. one minute i would be struggling like mad, look at my garmin, and see we were doing 8:06. another minute, i'd think, 'well that's more like it', look at my garmin and we were doing 9:46. is this normal? overall his pacing was spot on though, but by 8 miles i'd had enough of speeding up and slowing down, so i went off on my own. i was actually ahead of them until 11 miles, when suddenly they all came flying past and left me for dead. i was still doing 9:0x miling as i had been since i left them, so it wasn't me changing my pace. bit odd really.
"also the goody bag was frankly sh1te. can't believe we paid all that money to enter and there was no memorabilia other than a medal. "
It is raising money for Bernardos. I would happily have no mementos at all and see more money go to charity. Myself, I run for the joy of running and that is enough for me.
welsh alex - other halfs manage to be charity events and still provide stuff in the goody bag. companies do donate (even in this climate). i would rather have had no goody bag at all than the rubbish that was in the one i had yesterday - it just went into the bin / recycling. what was the point of that? they had obviously gone to the effort of getting freebies from companies and putting them in bags, but they weren't the sort of thing that you would want. they were all for blokes. last year, apparently, they were all for women (i didn't do it so i can't comment). so if they are going to provide a goody bag and go to the effort of getting freebies, at least they could try and get stuff that people might want. they were giving away powerade left, right and centre, so why not put a bottle of that in the goody bag along with the granola bar? and a tiny box of dried fruit or something rather than the jar (glass?!?! did anyone think about H&S with that one?) of cranberry sauce. they obviously thought we would all catch a cold waiting in the mile long baggage queues, hence the fishermen's friends and the herbal sweet!
Hmm, for me it is all about the running. I just can't get worked up about the goody bag.
Now if someone was to say to me that miles 3 & 4 had their markers in the wrong places .........
Caramel like you my little girl always wear's mine she looks forward to me finishing so she can wear mine with pride. Shes just younger than your son 2 and a half.
The baggage queues were horrendous. The only real downside to an otherwise well organised event. Not a bad route, very flat and fast and the weather was perfect.
I agree with Caramel though, the goody bag was v. poor, they might as well not have bothered.
i think i have been spoilt by the plymouth half (i'm from plymouth but haven't lived there in 20 years). it's not a charity event, admittedly, BUT it is fabulously well organized and the last time i ran it, you snaked through the finishing area and got to pick up pasties / cakes / tea / coffee / soup / hot choc as you went through, as well as a goody bag with non-crap stuff in it.
anyway i shall shut up on goody bags. i know they aren't important.
my legs hurt today. in fact my right leg does not appear to be attached to the rest of my body. it certainly does not obey commands from my brain. therefore i suspect the nursery staff were thinking i was drunk this morning as i battled to drop off a wriggly 7 month old, a 3 year old, 2 rucksacks and a book bag, with my right leg doing its very own 'thang'.
My right ankle is in a different time zone
Had my first massage yesterday after the race and It most definately wont be my last
The drive home to Reading wasnt enjoyable, but the little one slept all the way home, Not going to be able to bring her to any of my races now, she is a nightmare and just wants to join in
dean - perhaps you need to find events with fun runs and your little one can trot round with mum?
perhaps my right leg and your right ankle are in the same place then??
I have done a few Caramel after starting running this year, She is at that bad two year old stage at the moment.
The crowd really were great Michael got goose bumps a few times while running round
If anyone is thinking about improving their times, go to Torfaen next week. The elevation profile is here
Downhill all the way !
I liked the goody bags and the bags themselves were re-usable and a nice memento. Really couldn't care what was in them, as long as there's a drink at the end. I was quite glad not to have a T shirt tbh, mine just end up going to the charity shops I have so many.
The medal is lovely though, and I do like a nice shiny medal. I thought I'd lost mine this morning and had a mini panic
Yes, family band was fab! I was starting to feel really crap when I went passed them so it was probably around mile 8.
The goodie-bag was average, so what? The re-usable bag with logo in itself is better than the usual carrier bag, and much more preferable to a t-shirt. The towels last year were nice too.
Medal is great, I'm impressed with that.
Oh yeah, and you always get people in the wrong pens, over-estimating their predicted times. I started in the sub 1:30, and within half a mile had to overtake peeps who clearly weren't gonna maintain that pace. It's a common fault at races, and is not mutually exclusive to Cardiff Half