Run Northumberland Half Marathon

The Run Northumberland Half Marathon took place on Sunday 25th March.  Several runners represented Claremont, amongst them Chris Hogarth, who provides this race report:

This was my first half marathon of the year.  After a cold morning in Newcastle and a very foggy drive up to Wallington the sun was out by the time we got to the start line.  Personally I found the course pretty tough in comparison to the Redcar half and the GNR which were the only other halfs I had done.  The first 4k were a nice way to start being a combination of flat and down hill.  Then from 5k until pretty much 19k there were lots of ups and downs – with the last couple of k being downhill once again. On a personal note I was aiming to beat 2 hours as I havent managed this yet.  I was going well until about 16k when I once again realised that you shouldn’t run 10 miles twice and kid yourself that you’ve trained for a half marathon.  Fortunately I managed it but I’ll certainly be training properly for the next one.  I was speaking to Pierre before the race and he was going for sub 1h45m and managed to beat that by over a minute which was a splendid effort.  I didn’t see the other Claremont runners before hand but all seem to have recorded times which look very impressive to me.  The day was reasonably well organised with the only gripe being the numerous mistakes in the results (2 of which can be seen below).

Claremont runners (position on the extreme left then race number to the left of that).

45 401 Tim Pigott Claremont Road Runners M 24 1:29:31
159 400 Lanoe Pierre-Henri Claremont Road Runners L 16 10 1:43:45
181 275 Nina Jensen Claremont Road Runners LV35 21 8 2 1:45:58
220 385 Dean O’Brien Claremont Road Runners M 86 1:48:35
326 253 Chris Hogarth Claremont Road Runners L 72 30 1:56:33