Quite a lot of us had attended the St Neots Half Marathon a couple of years ago when we were part of another local running club. Fast forward to the present day, with a global pandemic having scuppered last year’s plan, and here we are, as part of a Northamptonshire’s newest running club, ready to tackle the hills of Cambridgeshire.
The St Neots Half Marathon, organised by Riverside Runners, is quite a picturesque event which I’d recommend to all abilities. It’s certainly not a gruelling tough challenge, but neither is it a bland flat easy experience. It’s well organised, with plenty of water stations.
The one downside this year, which was kind of out of the hands of Riverside Runners, were the rather tacky finishing medals. Now, I don’t really care too much for medals, I like to get a nice finishing time, but even I was bemused at how these medals felt like they’d fallen out of a Christmas cracker! Of course, it wasn’t the fault of the organisers, who were left scrambling for these at the last minute when they were let down by their original supplier.
I had an unusual inclusion in all of this. You see, on this day, I wasn’t Peter Thomas, oh no. I was North Yorkshire’s very own Jonny Yare.
Due to a leg injury, Jonny decided not to take part in this 13.1 mile event and generously gave his place to any Finedon Gladstone Running Club member who was up for it, and that would be where I came in. Now, you can’t change the entrant’s name, so there I was, with JONNY emblazoned on my bib. That’s not so bad, imagine the embarrassment if it was Lucy or Julia who passed their place on to me?
And so it was me cosplaying as FG’s favourite Northerner. When hordes of villagers greeted us at Eynesbury Hardwicke, they were, with the best of intentions, yelling “go on Jonny” at me and I had to grin and accept my new moniker. I’ve been called worse things.
I’d shaved off 7 minutes off my previous half marathon PB. Just minutes before the race started, I quickly looked up a pace calculator on my phone to work out what my average time per kilometre was for that previous PB. Turns out it’s 5m37s, so armed with that info, I went determined to equal or better that, and had my watch set to alert me at each kilometre.
This tactic worked, even though I had a bit of pessimism about it. I thought I could do well for about a half, maybe two thirds of the distance, and then fall behind, but no, every single kilometre was completed in less than 5m37s. The last two were agonising, with me running headlong into cold freezing wind and I think I was only a second behind on the final stretch, but it didn’t matter. I had, overall, did each kilometre in 5m23s on average.
I had done Jonny proud. I felt like I needed to, having seen him do a sub-23 minute parkrun in the summer.
And of course, the best part of a day out like this, was a pub lunch with the rest of Finedon Gladstones in a nearby pub. My brother had made the journey over to greet us all at the finish line and recommended The Cambridgeshire Hunter for a drink and a meal. Well, I just had to say ‘yeah’, or perhaps… Yare.
Pubtastic!
