Hillingdon Half Marathon (April 2015)
A GREAT SUCCESS FOR THE SECOND YEAR AT UXBRIDGE
Sunday 12th of April
Athletics Training World Director and race organiser JAMES SHIPLEY said “Things have gone really well. We seem to be lucky with the weather like last year.’
‘It was fantastic to see Paul Martelletti enter at the last minute. It was a nice surprise. Paul being one of the top runners in the country so, for him to come and do our race is an honour. The first two of last year came back again and, did it. Considering it is only two weeks before the London Marathon we were not expecting to get the same numbers but we were not far off the amount we had last year.”
PAUL MARTELLETTI (69.41) who has now done nine half marathons this year and won six of those, went clear after 6 miles.
In the race in spring sunshine, that started and finished in the Brunel University Campus, he took 59 seconds off the course record set by Rob Thompson last year.
Martelletti was using the race as a bit of a sharpener, as a warm up for the Manchester marathon on the following Sunday.
”My plan had been to sit back a little bit to begin with and go then at about 5.25/5.30, slightly under marathon pace’
He added “I liked the course as it was two laps and, I would get a feel for it. I went through 6 miles in about 33 minutes. I knew if I was going a bit slower I could pick it up on the downhill. There were a good crowd of people there’
‘In fact it was quite windy so my heart rate into the wind was about 4 beats higher at the same pace.”
Martelletti said regarding his mileage that he was usually heading towards 100 miles a week.
’A lot of miles in the legs, when you race the half marathon, simulates the feeling you have at the end of a marathon. It toughens you up a bit.”
Martelletti was followed in by James Laing (71:53), who ran a personal best half marathon time in the race but he had not done any training for the half marathon this year as, he thought, Hillingdon AC would be going to the National road relay the day before, which they decided not to do. In third place was Rob Thompson (73:56) who was quite pleased with his result, considering he had a hip then a knee injury in the winter months. “I had a problem with the hip at the start of the winter season, after the first Met League (5th at Claybury in November). “About the time of the Middlesex Championships at the beginning of the year I had a knee problem so, this was the longest run I have done since November. Getting back to it now.”
Euan Williams was the first over 40 runner in 4th place, after being the first Vet in the Thames Riverside 20. The second M40 was Riel Carol in 7th place of the 367 finishers. He came from France fifteen years ago and, ran a 2:33.54 marathon at Frankfurt in 2012.
The first woman was Jenny McBain (37), a teacher at Royal Latin School. At one time she had three years out with a complicated operation on her hips and, doctors wondered whether it would all stand up to racing longer distances. “The operation I had was to dislocate the hips and shave a little bit off the top of the femur and stitch the cartilage back together.’
It was a process where they don’t really know how you are going to come back until you actually start to try”
McBain ran a personal best half marathon at Woking on the 8th of March this year (81:54), as third woman in the Surrey half marathon. Back in 2010 in the Abingdon Marathon she did 2:58.10.
She plans to do a marathon in October and is philosophical about it all when she said
“Now my aim is to have fun and see what my legs can get away with.”