Steve Haywood Health & Fitness

When my wife and I planned to spend a few days near Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago I didn’t envisage doing a race of any kind. The idea was to visit the city to see my daughter Linda and her partner Rob. Well I suppose one way of seeing a city is to run around its streets for just over 6 miles so I joined Linda and Rob on Sunday, May 3rd, along with 10,000 others.

As we milled around before being called to the start we caught site of the elite athletes preparing themselves, they looked like greyhounds which didn’t help my slight pre race nerves. We were called to the start and I was in the orange section which was basically behind the elite athletes, so Rob and I waited patiently for the various activities and announcements while we watched the start clock ticking down.

Before the race: Linda, Rob & Steve

We were off; downhill towards Princes Street went the tide of humanity sweeping me along. I had my Garmin on and knew from training that I didn’t want to get swept along any quicker than 5 minutes per kilometre for the first half of the race or I would pay the price. You knew when the kilometre markers were coming up as pipers were there to blast out on the bagpipes.

The first kilometre was spot on and I was feeling ok and then after about 3k we made the turn up Holyrood which slowed most of us mere mortals down, it was about a 1000 metres gradually uphill. After that the course is undulating but fortunately there are no long, yawning stretches that can be daunting as you tire. The crowds were very encouraging although this was not the whole way round.

I finished in 54.05 secs, in 2751st position and 51st in my age category( you will have to look on the results if you wish to find out what that was.) It was a very enjoyable race, well marshalled, good but tough course and hopefully I will be back next year. One thing puzzled me however, how fit were those pipers? They were there at every kilometre without fail, how they got round is amazing.

Keeping warm in a space blanket afterwards