Bourton half marathon (Bourton Hilly Half) 2025

I recently ran Bourton half marathon, previously known as the Bourton Hilly Half, with a few members of my club. Bourton half, based in Bourton-on=the-Water in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire is on our club’s road race series and the Gloucestershire AAA race series. Bizarrely, it is also the county championship for the half marathon. Why couldn’t they just choose Stroud, which is undulating, but there’s a chance of a PB?

I secured myself the LV50 10k county championship a couple of weeks previously at Angels 10k and was keen to do the double and become half marathon county champion too.

Bourton half marathon is one of three races organised by Bourton Roadrunners running club. The others are Bourton 10k and the Bourton Mile. This year, I’ve run all three of them, as well as the Greystones 10k in Bourton. The start and finish of Bourton half are also at Greystones Farm.

There was no parking on site and we were advised to use car parks in the village. I got a lift over with some other club members because I was slightly nervous about navigating my way from the car park to the start of the race. As it turns out, it was very close!

We picked up our numbers and attached our timing tags to our shoes. The weather was drizzly and cold. I’m not sure why I bothered with the suncream! The bag drop was outside under a roof. It wasn’t actually secure, but there were people around and it seemed perfectly safe. The toilets were the Greystones toilets. There was just two cubicles for the ladies, but the queue never got very long.

We had to walk a few minutes to the start line, on a narrow country lane. At 9am, we were off! As ever, I started way too fast, but I soon settled into my pace. The race was all on open roads, apart from the bit right at the start where we ran into the centre of the village. The road was closed for just 10 minutes to let us pass. Bourton-on-the-Water really is a beautiful village. It’s no surprise it is so popular with tourists.

We started the first climb at about a mile. It was long and pretty steep. Then we basically ran all the way back down again, which is nice. But what goes down must go up, so then we climbed back up again…

The information before the race suggested there were two big hills and one smaller one. It felt like more than that. I spent most of the race questioning – is this a big hill or a small one? Is this the last hill?

There were mileage markers which seemed a bit inaccurate – the mile marker was at 1.2 miles, but then they stayed pretty consistent – two miles at 2.2 miles etc.

There was a very small amount of traffic, but that wasn’t a problem. There weren’t many runners and we were all pretty spread out. We were allowed bone conducting headphones which were much-needed, because it was actually a pretty boring course!

There was water at 4.5 miles and 8.5 miles in paper cups. As ever, I was carrying my own drink anyway, but attempted to slurp some water.

By about six miles, I could feel my legs, which is unusual. Usually the thing which holds me back on a run is my heartrate or my breathing. The downhills were nice, but in the end even they weren’t that nice, as my legs were so tired from going uphill. One downhill was so steep I had to make a real effort to actually slow down because I didn’t want to fall.

At one point, I thought it looked a bit like Sherborne, where we ran the Sherborne 5 Miler earlier this year. It turns out it was where we’d run it. Then we ran through a village called Clapton-on-the-Hill, which I’ve never heard of before.

At 10 miles, I was briefly running in the sun. The sun had been trying to break through the clouds and it broke through at one of the only points on the route which wasn’t covered by trees. At about 10.5 miles, I felt like I was probably on the Bourton 10k route and I soon realised I definitely was! This is a gradual downhill towards the village.

Looking at my pace at this point, I thought I was on for 1:50. I wasn’t sure what time I’d expected, but I had hoped for slightly faster than that.

As we got to the outskirts of the village, we were told to use the path rather than the road. At about 12 miles I saw the layby where we had waited before the start of the Bourton Mile. We didn’t run straight down into the village centre. We were sent through a housing estate. A lady overtook me and pulled away from me quickly. She seemed to be running really well, but then I caught her up and overtook her again. She’d obviously been ready for a sprint finish a bit early.

I was listening to the playlist I’d made for Cheltenham half marathon. It is 1;48 long, so I repeated Breakthru by Queen, rather than let it finish and start again on a song not designed for finishing a race.

There was a lot of winding around houses and alleyways, then we were back on the country lane where we’d started. I was tired and desperate for it all to be over. But it was flat and the end was near, so I picked up the pace and kept running, past the carefully marked potholes, past the conkers all over the ground, past the start line and the 13 mile marker and finally back onto the Greystones site and over the finish line.

I finished in 1:48:57 to the sound of Levellers’ One Way. I was first LV50 and county champion. Lots of club members also picked up county gold, silver or bronze medals.

Finishers got a cup or two of water, a choice of either a waterbottle, a snood (or a buff if you want to call it that) or a Tshirt. I would have liked a Tshirt, but they only had medium or large and they looked huge, so I opted for the snood. The prizes were very generous – £100 for the first male and female, £50 for second and £25 for third, plus £20 for age group category winners (just the big categories – 40, 50 and 60, not 45, 55 etc).

But the hills, the boring roads and the lack of support meant I really didn’t enjoy Bourton Hilly Half. It was exactly a week after Cheltenham half marathon, which was brilliant, with loads of support on the route and largely flat. It felt like Bourton took about twice as long! The other club members felt the same.

But will I have forgotten that by next year? Will I be back if it’s the county championship again? Probably!