Stroud half marathon 2022

Stroud half marathon 2022 was the 40th Stroud half. It was my fourth and my 23rd half marathon in total.

My husband was supposed to be running, but he pulled out a couple of weeks beforehand due to a recurring injury. I’m not a great fan of going to races entirely on my own, but needs must!

The weather forecast was AWFUL. Torrential rain overnight and all morning, including thunderstorms from 9am (the exact time the race started) until 1pm. I packed a complete change of clothing, including shoes and underwear.

The forecast wasn’t wrong. I drove there in the dark in torrential rain along the winding and hilly A46 through floodwater. It was the most treacherous drive I’ve ever done! I had a coat and hoodie on over my running kit and got thoroughly drenched on the walk from the car park. My shoes and socks were soaked long before I made it to the start line.

I’m pleased to say the queues for the toilets weren’t bad and the queues for the bag drop were non-existent. I put my wet coat in a bin liner inside my rucksack to stop it wetting my ‘dry’ stuff (which was also quite wet from the rain soaking through my bag) and put a bin liner on over my kit to keep me dryish and warmish.

Just before the race started, the rain stopped. I’m pleased to say that the thunder never materialised.

I bumped into a colleague at the start. He’s 23 and has run the London marathon and Bath half marathon in the last few weeks. He was aiming for 1:45, although his PB was 1:37. Needless to say, I didn’t see him for dust once we’d started running. (He ended up getting a new PB, finishing in 1:34:19.)

I started off quickly. The start is a long downhill, which you don’t entirely appreciate until you’re running back up it at the end!

I hadn’t realised I was running just in front of the 1:45 pacer until I heard him shout ‘two miles, seven seconds ahead’ at the two-mile marker. After that, I slowed down a bit.

I always tell others (and myself) that Stroud half isn’t that hilly really. But I realised it is.

There’s quite a climb at around 3.5 miles, as the route passes out of Stonehouse and through Standish. Then it crosses the M5 for the first time before the biggest climb – up the A38 to Whitminster. At this point, it started raining. I’m pleased to say it only lasted about 15 minutes and, although it got quite heavy, it wasn’t torrential.

The A38 is a busy main road, and the runners are on the road with only a row of cones separating them form the traffic. At one point, there was an enormous puddle – more like a flood than a puddle – with an extra marshal, because we had to run round the puddle and into the traffic.

There are very few road closures on the Stroud half marathon route, which is the reason headphones are completely banned. I always run with headphones for even the shortest runs, but running without them isn’t so bad. There’s a lot of countryside, so it’s not non-stop crowds, but there are enough crowds to give me a lift and take my mind off things.

Stroud is well-known for being an extremely green town, so the half marathon had to be sustainable. On paper, that meant no water bottles/ cups. There were only two water stops – at 4.5 miles and 10 miles – and the theory was that runners took their own containers to fill up. I always run with my own drink anyway, but normally grab water at a couple of the water stops. I took the decision I wasn’t going to bother filling a container I didn’t really need. Very few people seemed to stop for water. But of course, they did have cups! They were large plastic ones, which were presumably reusable. I suppose morally they couldn’t provide nothing, because it’s far too much of a health and safety risk.

Anyway, once we got to the top of the A38 at Whitminster, we were halfway. And I was running pretty quickly. I did over seven miles in an hour. It would be nice to say that it was downhill all the way after Whitminster, but that wasn’t actually true. It was downhill for a while, but there were still a few uphills. The route crossed over the motorway again and then went into a new housing estate.

We’d been told the route had changed a bit and I wondered if I would notice the change. I did! We were in the new housing estate for quite a long time. It cut out a big bit of the A419, where we had previously run alongside the traffic, and some of the industrial estate that we used to run through at about the 10 or 11 mile mark. Strangely, for somewhere made up entirely of houses, there were less supporters out than there were along the main roads.

After the new housing estate, we went into the industrial estate for a short time. And the sun started to come out! Then we were onto the A419 (I think) and joined back up with our outward route. When you’ve just started running, and you’re running downhill, it seems to fly by. When you’ve run 11.5 miles, the sun is out and you’re running uphill, it feels really tough!

The crowds were great and very encouraging. Although when they said we’d reached the top of the hill, they weren’t actually right! It is literally uphill right to the finish line.

I finished Cheltenham half marathon seven weeks earlier in 1:53:25. Post-Covid, and not getting any younger, I was happy with that. I would have been happy with anything under 2 hours at Stroud. I finished in 1:51:08. The race was harder than I remembered, but I was very pleased with that time, which put me in the top 20% of women and the top 20% in my age category of 40-49 (and I’m 49, remember!).

No doubt I’ll be back next year…