Clontarf is an area of Dublin just north of the city centre. They promise Dublin’s flattest half marathon, which after Tollymore a few weeks ago had a strong appeal.
The course goes out along the seafront before taking the wooden bridge over to Bull Island. It then goes over to the far side of the island facing onto the Irish sea and along the beach for two kilometres before heading back across the island, onto the mainland and along the coastal path towards Howth. You then turn around and re-trace your steps.
Over 3,000 people took part meaning the course was busy. Once we were back on the main land there were lots of runners coming the other way and overtaking became difficult. I was aiming for the 1:50 wave, but somehow found myself in the 1:45 wave and yet still spent the whole race overtaking people.
On the way out, the beach was lovely. There was plenty of firm sand to run on. On the way back, things were more challenging. The tide had come in and covered a lot of the sand. The wind became a strong cross-head wind and a lot of people found it so hard going that they dropped to a walk. I managed to battle on but at over two kilometres it was a hard 15 minutes!
Thankfully, we did eventually reach the bridge and back onto the mainland. The wind and tide was now throwing waves over the seafront wall so my careful attempts to keep my feet (and my hair) dry were at an end. At least we got a brief tail wind coming back across the bridge.
My official time was:
1:46:57
Officially, I didn’t care about time and just wanted to take it easy and have fun. But a part of me also wanted to make sure I was under 1:50 so that I could tell myself that if I was actually trying, I could go much faster. In the end, I was comfortably under and that was good enough for 629 out of 2,307.
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Tags: half marathon, ireland, running
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 30th, 2022 at 11:00 am and is filed under Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.