Birmingham Half

On the 24th of October I headed up to Birmingham for their half marathon. Went up on the Friday night with Kathy and had a bit of a look around the city. Didn't do a great deal of research on things to do so didn't end up seeing much - although the weather on the Saturday was pretty crap so spent most of the afternoon watching Goldfinger and Where Eagles Dare :)

For the most part, the race was really well organised, however there were a couple of things that really detracted from it:

• The course was very narrow in places which resulted in having to walk through the bottlenecks
  
• The finish area couldn't handle the number of competitors, so the crowd of finishers waiting to get their timing chips cut off their shoes backed up over the finish line. I got to within five metres of the finish and had to stop because of the crowd - took a further three minutes to get over the line.

I managed to finish in 2:05 a new PB, so was happy with that :)

Despite the crapness at the finish line, I'd definitely go back again.

Random story; I was standing at the start chatting to a random guy and girl, the girl looks at my bib number and asks what the number was, look at hers and they were consecutive... Give that there was about 20,000 people there, thought that was kinda cool... Or not... :)