14 March 2006: Hastings

Did the Hastings Half-Marathon on Sunday.

An interesting experience: running up and down hills and along the sea front with about five thousand other people of varying running abilities. Kevin and I were pleased with the time of around 2 hours 10 mins, although I have to say I did sprint off at the end and finish a minute faster. Full results from the Hastings Half-Marathon website results page: note that although I appear as finishing in 2h12m, it took about 3 mins to get under the barrier at the beginning.

All that was supposed to have been taken into account by the electronic timing. On the back of our running numbers was a small electronic chip with a wire running around the edge of the paper, presumably some kind of mini transmitter aerial to tell the system when we started and finished. Seems it only told them when we finished, but that's ok, I can do the maths to figure it out.

One thing I was looking out for and never did see was something described in point seven of the race guidelines, published in the official programme. I've scanned it in so you can see I wasn't making it up.



I looked and looked but never saw a single marshal(l) with a hand-held badger. They did have little scanners for reading our chips, so perhaps that's what they meant. Still, it was greatly disappointing, particularly as Dr Chip reports the ability to make you see badgers by simply by testing your implants.

I don't know, maybe I got it wrong. Maybe we were supposed to implant the chips into our heads, and when the marshalls came along at the end to scan us, they would turn their dials.. slowly.. slowly.. slowly.. and suddenly all I can see is...