Over The Contours

In my preparations for the Greater Manchester Marathon in April, I've been looking to participate in a number of road races as part of the training. My approach differs from last year where I put in all of the hard miles going solo, whereas this year I want to become accustomed to the race environment and want to push myself beyond what I would do in training. The Deal half marathon was an obvious choice for me as it's relatively local and a quite a few people from my club were running it too. My colleague, Phil, holds the course record and had forewarned me that the course is 'undulating'. Still, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to put in some fast miles. Having parked at Betteshanger country park with my friend Chris, we collected our race numbers and then made our way down the long driveway to the starting line. The weather was awful; it had rained all morning and there was a fairly strong wind blowing. This would be a testing run. I shuffled my way to t...