Raduga Marathon, Minsk

By Friday I had got used to the heat and was fairly confident of surviving, although I had tired legs from walking around Minsk all week. I had originally planned not to take part if it was too hot, but too many people had already been told I would be running a marathon, so on Saturday morning I was pleased to see that the sky had clouded over and the temperature had dropped. I had discovered earlier in the week that it was too far to walk from home, so we got a taxi to the registration area where a few tents had sprung up. The organisers seemed quite excited to have a foreign participant, although I escaped the attentions of a small camera crew who were interviewing the oldest competitor, presumably for the local news.

The course consisted of 16 laps of a dirt track around part of the Slepyanka Water System, with a short section of tarmac across a bridge at one end, and a longer uphill section of pavement at the other, with a short, steep climb just before it. The path was strewn with stones and rutted in a few places, although ordinary running shoes were adequate. A couple of minutes before the 10.30am start, the clouds suddenly disappeared, so it would obviously be getting much hotter as the race went on and midday approached.

There were over 70 runners, a fair mix of ages and abilities. A few of them were wearing the national vest and looked like seasoned distance runners. The winning time from the previous year's race was 2:44 so I planned to settle in behind the leaders for a bit and see how it went, with the main goal of setting a PB or at least running inside 3 hours, ideally without winning which would not quite have been the done thing. One of the younger runners wearing the national vest took an early lead, closely followed by a female competitor who was breathing far too heavily within the first kilometre and soon fell away. I stayed a few paces behind the leader for the first three laps, which were run at a comfortable pace of about 10:40 per lap, but he started to slow down on the fourth and I soon found myself at the front. On the seventh lap, somebody else wearing the national vest came through fast to take the lead. I was surprised as I hadn't slowed all that much, so I guessed he must have missed the start by a few minutes. Soon afterwards I was passed by the early leader and another runner in a yellow cap who had been consistently a couple of dozen metres behind up until that point. I went through the halfway point in 1:25 or so which was perfectly fine and discovered the early leader seemed to have finished as he was just standing around at the water table, and although he appeared to run a few more laps later on, this moved me back up to third place.

After about two hours, with the conditions starting to become a problem, the runner in the yellow cap finished. He had been pulling away gradually so I can only guess he had planned to run for exactly that amount of time. This left me in second place with no sign of anyone behind me whom I hadn't already lapped, and the leader disappearing into the distance. By this time I was drinking lots of water or PSP22 every time I got to the water table at the finishing line, and planning what to drink next time around on the following lap to make the race less monotonous. By the 13th lap I was dropping below 8 minutes a mile and the third-placed runner went past me at a pace I was never going to keep up with (although at this point I thought he was still a full lap behind me). Any chance of a sub-3 time was also starting to disappear. Having got to the bell without being lapped by the leader, I managed to pick up slightly on the last lap and finished in 3:06:39, almost 10 minutes outside my PB from the 2001 Amsterdam Marathon, which was also my previous marathon.

My prize for second place in my age group (third overall, as I discovered when the official results appeared a few days later) was three bottles of shampoo and some equipment for drying wet shoes from the race sponsors, as well as a race t-shirt and medal (with a "2" on it). One of the officials played a few tunes on some kind of small wind instrument during the presentation, and we recognised Jingle Bells, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town and the theme from the Russian version of Sherlock Holmes - perhaps in honour of their sole British participant, although I didn't ask. The official results showed that of 73 runners, only 34 completed the distance.