Race Report: The Charles Darwin Day Marathon 12/02/2016

It's unusual to have any race scheduled mid-week but the Charles Darwin Day Marathon was arranged for Friday 12th February to commemorate the anniversary of Darwin's birth 207 years ago.

 The race took place in Shrewsbury, the City of Darwin's birth, at the Shrewsbury Sports Village. The 1 kilometre long tarmac cycle track provided a fantastic, smooth and traffic-free surface for the race and ensured that drinks, food and toilets were never far way during the race.


The race consisted of both a half-marathon and full marathon distance. To ensure that both sets of runners crossed the same finish line the full marathon runners started 200 further down the track. The track itself was mostly flat with just one slight incline up one side of a dog leg corner and down across the finish line. I'm convinced the incline got steeper throughout the 42 times I ran up it!

About 90 runners took part, split roughly even between the two distances. the tracks are plenty wide enough to ensure that there was no congestion whatsoever during the race.

There was a well-stocked and very welcome food and drinks stop at the start/finish line, along with music and the chip timing guys who kept the runners well informed on which lap they were running. I know from bitter experience it is extremely difficult to keep track of the laps in your head.

Crossing the line with Gary, a nice chap who's ran The Comrades Ultra 10 times!

Being only 1 kilometre long the laps do come round thick and fast, and being so many laps means there are always people to chase down or to chat to depending on how seriously you are taking the race. For my own part I was just happy to get round. I struggle to run long training runs and so I find the only way I can get sufficient long training runs in is to enter races. In the end I finished in 4:26, an hour over my personal best for the distance, but frankly it's been a long long time since I last expected to get anywhere close to that.

At the end of the race we were presented with our medals, a huge and heavy custom build medal that looks brilliant on the medal rack. 

The bling!

We were also given some free 9bars who sponsor each of the events organised by How Hard Can It Be Events. I can't recommend these events enough, they are friendly, well-organised low-key events with some impressive bling at the end! In addition this course makes for some fast times as quite a few runners earned themselves new personal best times.

I'm signed up for another 42 laps around this track in August for the Rocky Horror Picture Show Tribute Marathon if anyone fancies joining me?

Mik