Egmond Half Marathon

Despite not doing any training since my race at Ironman Western Australia on 3^rd December last year, I headed out yesterday to take part in the Egmond Half Marathon. I quite deliberately say ‘take part’ rather than ‘compete’, because I certainly was not doing the latter!

Egmond is one of those ‘must do’ events. It starts in Egmond aan Zee, a small seaside village north of Amsterdam. After a few kilometres in town, the course heads on to the beach, travelling 7km south, then turning back in to the dunes, and heading back north in the dunes and forests behind the beach.

It is a very beautiful course, made all the better yesterday by the fact that the sun was shining, giving the whole affair a very spring like feel.

However, all was not spring-like. Normally the beach in the Netherlands is wide and flat, which means the course here is usually on the harder, wet sand. Yesterday, however, the combination of a high tide and storm surges meant that the water levels were very high, leaving a narrow strip of beach, less than 10 metres wide in places. The race organisers delayed the start by an hour, waiting for the tide to drop, but there were still places where the waves urged up and we got wet feet! And with around 12,500 people in the race, it was pretty damn crowded on that narrow strip of sand, as the photo above shows.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the race. It is quite different to head out and just take it in, instead of going flat out. That said, it did hurt. Whilst my aerobic conditioning is still pretty good, my muscles did not take so well to suddenly running a reasonably hard half marathon after six weeks of leisure!

[And to be truthful, I made it worse by doing a 5km running time trial on Saturday, but that is another story…]

Anyway, I finished in the cruisy time of 1:44:10. I travelled up there with my colleague Agnes and her neighbour Juan, and both also finished in good times, Agnes finishing her first half marathon after only taking up running last year.

By this morning, the results were on the website, and there is even a video taken at the half way point. You can see just how crowded the course is, and if you look behind, you can see the ocean churning in the background.

Shane