This shouldn’t hurt, but you might feel a slight discomfort

The Great North Run. One day, I’m going to have a proper crack at it. This was going to be my year. I’d ran a 1:28 in April at Dorney Lake and was feeling great until roughly the moment I picked an unexpected fight with Scafell Pike. Having hurt my quadricep tendon falling, it was touch and go whether I’d be back running at all. A proper effort was never on the cards.

If you’d asked in July, I’d have told you I was frustrated with being in the orange wave as I was now running sub 90-min half marathons. Now I was more concerned that I’d start next too fast for my injured legs and fitness lacking lungs.

The day before the run itself was the first day for a month I hadn’t limped. I took that as a good sign, slapped on some KT tape and headed for the start. I was lucky to find myself in the start pen next to a friend from the running club who was aiming for a time somewhere between my original target and the time I was now aiming for.

The gun went and the sound of Knopfler’s Local Hero started. It took ten minutes for us to get going though, by which time it had moved onto some generic dance music. As always, adrenaline flowing, I started a little quicker than I should have. Having less runners at a time meant the ‘oggy oggy oggy’ tunnel was quieter than usual and, as we were amongst the first to start, the Tyne Bridge was quieter than at peak time. We soon settled in to our pace and started heading up towards the bypass.

This year the course had changed to an out and back due to the pandemic. One of the things that worked well about that is that you get to see the front pack pass the other way down the road. We missed the front of the women’s race as they were on the flyover but we saw the men’s elites followed not too far behind by the quick lads from our own club. I love getting to cheer for other Heaton runners and it’s amazing to run past and get their support too.

After Whitemare Pool roundabout the route doubled back on itself. At about 14k, I thanked Dave for the company and dropped off pace. I knew I was going quicker than I should and didn’t want to risk aggravating my injury or slowing him down.

Once I slowed down, I also started to feel a little of the tiredness from not having been running in the build up. The dog leg at Felling mysteriously took us on the flyover, a cruel and unusual touch that to a nice long downhill all the way over the Tyne Bridge.

It was great to finish up through the streets of the city, coming along Market Street and up Grey Street towards the Monument felt fantastic. Racing through city streets is great and something that the usual race route doesn’t have. It would be great for the Great Run company to start a 10k or other event that capitalises on the city centre vibes.

The spirit of the usual route lived on in a last mile along the Great North Road that felt deceptively long, just like the South Shields seafront.

It was a big relief for me to be able to run a half marathon only a month into injury recovery. I made it through pain free but there was some slight discomfort towards the end. It’s a promising sign, though mountains are a different thing entirely—as demonstrated by having to drop out of Ring of Steall Skyrace the following week.

Something I loved about the staggered starts was the fact that it made space to go and spectate after the end of the race.

My sister, Rachel, was doing her first Great North Run in memory of our younger sister Lizzie. I’m sure she won’t mind me saying that she isn’t the biggest fan of the whole running thing. But she’d stuck in with training and so I packed my cowbell—you can take the boy out of the mountains but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy—and headed for the Tyne Bridge.

I used the app to track friends and family over the bridge, cheering and ringing them through. Rachel out did herself on the day, setting PBs for 1k, 1 mile, 5k, 10k, 10 mile and finishing her first half marathon.

And that’s the best part of an event like the Great North Run, seeing people achieve hard things. It’s the look of pride on people’s faces when they push through pain, struggle through doubt. People find out things about themselves when they run, and never on a larger scale than at an event like this.

At the end of the day, the course isn’t all that, but it’s the event and the community coming together that keeps me coming back.