By: Dave Beech

Race Date: Saturday, 6^th July 2024

 

The Birmingham Black Country Half Marathon has been on my ‘bucket list’ of races for a good few years. Being a point-to-point race from Wolverhampton to Birmingham, and being a couple of hours travel from Sheffield meant that careful planning was required. Having committed to entering this year’s race and realising that it has a rolling start similar to Sheffield’s own RSR race opened-up the possibility of doing a parkrun prior to the main race. A quick internet search revealed that the nearest Parkrun was only a couple of miles from the start of the BBCHM. So it was that I found myself travelling by train on the Friday, having a reminisce around my old teenage stomping ground of Wolverhampton town centre and staying overnight in a very cheap Air-BNB flat in Monmoor Green. Now Monmoor Green, an industrial area of Wolverhampton, isn’t the most salubrious part of town but all was nice and peaceful until I was rudely awoken with a start in the early hours by some boy racers trying out the loud exhausts on their cars!

My Saturday went something like this:

8.15am: I set out with my overnight bag for the 30 minutes walk to East Park, Wolverhampton. By prior arrangement the kind organisers of the Parkrun looked after the bag for the duration of the race.

9.00am: I line up with 127 other Parkrunners to tackle the East Park Parkrun. This is a 2 lap course around the perimeter of the beautifully kept park resplendent with it’s own bandstand. The tarmac paths are wide and predominately flat, which on another day would make for a P.B. course. However conscious of what was ahead I tried to pace myself so that I still have something left at the end for the main race. I’m happy with 31^st place overall and 1^st MV65. In preparation for the half marathon I wear my race number for the Parkrun as did a couple of other runners, so it seemed that I’m not the only person attempting the ‘double’.

9.30am: I collect my bag, walk the half mile to the main road and make the 10 minute bus journey to the start area of the main race.

10.15am: I’m lining-up ready to run in the BBCMH. The start of the race is quite surreal in that every runner has to individually go through a metal gate leading from a rundown old canal basin to the starting mat next to the very dilapidated canal. The route takes us along the towpath of the Old Mainline canal through the industrial Black Country to the much more glamorous Bradley Place in Birmingham’s Canal Quarter. Repairs to the towpath at Galton Bridge meant that we were sent on a detour onto the Higher Level canal, which as the name suggests is above the Mainline Canal. This adds an extra half mile to the distance, though some runners managed to get lost and ended up doing 15 miles! About a mile from the end of the race we have to stop as one of the earlier runners is laid out stone-cold in front of us on the towpath. The runner had apparently tripped up on the uneven downhill part of a canal bridge, fallen into the canal and, having been dragged out by a couple of quick-thinking runners, then had a seizure. Thankfully the first-aiders had arrived quickly and were trying to revive the runner as I reached that point in the race: all very dramatic. We were ushered through the tiny gap between the runner’s foot and the canal one by one. I finished 396^th out of more than 1,100 runners (8^th MV60) in just under 2 hours.

12.15pm: The race organisers had provided a bag transfer service so my overnight bag is there for me at the end of the race. The post-race goodie bag is quite impressive, it included a t-shirt, a large medal, a chocolate bar, a flapjack, a couple of bottles of water and a traditional stick of rock with the name of the race embedded within it. I spend time with some of the other finishers discussing the drama and comparing notes on what distance the ‘half marathon’ actually was before meeting my sister, who lives in Birmingham, to have a meal in a local restaurant before returning to her house.

5.00pm: We watch England beat Switzerland on penalties to go through to the semi-final of the Euros. Could this be England’s year to win the cup? we wonder. A week later and the answer once again is a negative one, the same as in every competition England have played in for the last 58 years!

I was the sole representative from Steel City Striders in both the Parkrun and the Half Marathon.

Thomas Brooke (Cambridge Harriers) won the Half Marathon in 1:13:35 and Sarah Clinton (PGC1 Coaching) was first female in a time of 1:39:08. There were 1,137 finishers.

Strider’s Result: