East Sussex : Brighton Marathon recap

I signed up for Brighton marathon because I hadn't got into London and I wanted to be sure of a spring marathon.  However, as it turned out, I ended up with a place in London as well, so by the time Brighton rolled around it felt like a training run.  I'd hoped to run it in 4 hours 30 minutes, though I'd really struggled to do that just a couple of weeks earlier.   Then I found out that my friend Tom was running it as well, so we agreed to meet up at the start and run it together. 

The marathon was due to start at 9.15am, we rocked up at 8.45am and the park was awash with people.  It was predicted to be a pretty hot day for April and was already warm when we got there.

It took ages to cross the start line but that was lucky as Tom's train had been cancelled and we only met up a few minutes before our wave set off for the start line.  The marathon went down to the seafront then along towards Rottingdean and inland a bit before looping back.  There were quite a few places where the race was going in both directions.

Lots of pretty sea views!  Running with Tom was really great as he's run loads of marathons so we had lots to chat about, and because he usually finishes somewhere over 5 hours, he was pacing me to not run too quickly.  As a result I had a really enjoyable run because I often go too fast and then struggle at the end.  As it was warm, the pace was absolutely ideal and it was really lovely to have company, a rare treat for me.  We chatted about how Tom's best time was around 5 hours and I thought we were on track to beat that today, he was a little more circumspect about that possibility.  As the marathon progressed, we clearly had a good shot at it and despite being utterly knackered, Tom put in an amazing performance in the last mile and we crossed the finish line together in 4 hours, 57 minutes and 11 seconds.  He even pulled off a sprint finish which left me struggling to keep up!

Feeling suitably delighted with this, we got our medals and took some photos. 

And here's the official race photo:

There is a slightly sad addendum to this story, which is that we didn't really finish in 4:57.  Due to tiredness and stupidity on my part, I had forgotten to turn off the 'Auto Pause' setting on my Garmin (something I always do before marathons).  As a result it was showing our moving time, not elapsed time.  I didn't discover this until the following afternoon, after much ranting about how the chip time was totally wrong.  Sigh....