The forest of dean spring half marathon - Sunday 20th March 2022

A beautiful Sunny day and the first day of my week off work and what better way to start it than as a Buzzard in a race. The Forest of Dean Spring Half. I was expecting a relatively small event and was confused as to why my Mum kept going on about how the email had said the parking area
was enormous. When we arrived it was fairly quite but there were those awesome people in yellow, everywhere! So we followed their directions and parked. Making my way to the hive of activity I sailed through Bib Collection amd had my first pre-race wee.

I soon found Hannah and we chatted away and before we knew it the queues for both bibs and
Toilets were crazy! We found Gillian and my second pre-race wee followed.
We took a few pre-race snaps, looked around to see if we could find the male buzzards that were signed up but had no such luck.
Hannah and I had decided it was going to be a steady race and Gillian, on her first race back after the arrival of her beautiful Girl, just wanted to finish with everything in its rightful place! 

So we headed to the back of the pack at the start line and only then could we see the size of the  event. The amount of people was crazy. Off we went. A lovely down hill to start and we were all smiling. We didn’t notice the first photographer so were determined to spot the rest. Shortly after, we found one and we performed perfectly!

Before we knew it we’d reached the first of 4 water stations and we lost Gillian. She had found her
rhythm and she was off. Hannah and I enjoyed a great run, not pushing ourselves and happy to be plodding along in the sun. A few hills here and there but a really lovely route following alot of the family cycle trail.

It felt like no time at all before the finish was upon us and we were over the line. At this point I got us in a bit of a muddle as my distance hadn’t clocked a half so off round the field I went. Hannah chasing in tow. Only to realise Hannah was yelling at me that we hadn’t collected our medals! So back we went and Gillian guided us round the exit we should have taken to collect medals, drinks and our timing slips. These slips declared there were over 1000 runners. Wow! No small event.

Hannah was happy to make it round uninjured. Having been struck by Covid several times in the last few months, her training had not gone to plan. Finally, we took a well deserved finishers photo and I felt very grateful to have run a great race and made new running buddies and friends.