Goodwood Roller Marathon
19/08/2008 by rebecca.
On Sunday 10th August, over 300 skaters travelled to the Goodwood motor circuit near Chichester for the Goodwood roller marathon. There were 4 races happening:
The mega race: 26 laps/ 62.92 miles/ 101.26 km
The full marathon: 11 laps/ 26.62 miles/ 42.84 km
The midi race: 5 laps/ 12.10 miles/ 19.47 km
The mini race: 2 laps/ 4.84 miles/ 7.74 km
Having never skated a marathon, I had originally chosen to do the midi race. But, after much persuasion, I entered the full marathon (26.62 miles).
I arrived at Goodwood at 11am, and collected by timing chip and race number. After putting my skates on, I went onto the track to warm up. The first thing that struck me was the wind - it was unbelievably strong!
Just before 12 o’clock, all 300 skaters lined up for the start of the race, with the serious competitors (wearing lycra!) at the front.
At 12pm the race started. The lycra crew sped ahead with the rest of us trailing behind.
After skating out of the start/finish straight, the track turns left. Suddenly I was confronted with a hill. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t have been a particularly challenging hill, but with 35mph winds against me this hill was not fun. At the top of the hill, where the track turns towards the water stop, the winds were so strong I almost came to a stand-still. A friend of mine said that she started going backwards (and not on purpose!) due to the strength of the wind. The funny thing was, on a circular track I expected that at some point the wind would be behind me making things a bit easier. But it seems that at Goodwood that is not the case. It felt as if the wind was against me the entire way round the track. As time went on, the wind seemed to get stronger.
After a few laps I was really struggling and considering giving up. I had worked out what my average lap time needed to be in order to do the race in my target time, but even my fastest lap was slower than what my average needed to be. But I carried on regardless.
3 hours and 20 minutes later, I finally finished the marathon! The first thing I did was buy myself an ice cream.
A lot of my friends had done the Goodwood marathon before, and a lot of them said that the wind strength made it a lot tougher than before. I’ll blame my slow time on that!
My next marathon experience will be the Berlin Marathon on the 27th September. I’ll have to put in some serious training for that!