Runner's Story from Last Year Jon Littlechild, Caroline Blackburn and Adam Early

Race day came (note – it wasn’t a race for us) and probably like many doing their first, we felt a bit under prepared. Registration was as slick as I’ve seen. On lots of events I’ve felt compelled to arrive an hour or so before the start to get bibs, join the back of the queue for the loos etc. but the Clarendon was as easy as it comes. One of the things they’ve absolutely nailed, either by design or by accident is the traffic flow through the registration process. How many times have we had to fight our way into a local village hall, collect a bib and paperclips and then have to fight our way back out again? At Laverstock you go in one door, do what you need to do, and then out another door at the other end of the building to get to the start. That blockage of people never occurs – simple but brilliant. I know it sounds trivial, but when you’re feeling a bit ‘event nervous’, little things help.

As we went out to the start line, there was a light drizzle, which was a result given the woeful forecast a few days prior. We joined the 9:30 mass start – as recommended by the wealth of good information we were sent in the weeks before. Off we went, slightly worried about the 26 miles of hills in front of us. The route is predominantly trail but the first half mile or so is on tarmac through the village and you soon start to climb the first hill as you leave the road and hit the gravel. And this is pretty much how it is for the whole route; country trails with the odd bit of road as you go in and out of the villages. I’d had a little look at the route the day before, so I knew the villages that were coming and they made great mental milestones to tick off in my head; Pitton, Winterslow, Broughton, Houghton, King’s Somborne, Farley Mount (not a village, but certainly a milestone) and finally into western Winchester. Also, the route is marked with mile markers that count down, from 26 (obviously) and they also provide a great mental boost as you go past each one. To begin with, they ticked past surprisingly quickly, but less quickly towards the end though.

Clarendon Marathon 2024. Jon Littlechild, Caroline Blackburn and Adam Early from Muddy Runners, Andover.

On the whole the route is a great route to run because there’s so much going on all the time. In addition to the villages and the mile-markers, there’s plenty of water stations to pass or grab a drink from (and to get that bit of support from). There’s also the three relay stations – quarter marathon milestones in their own right. And because there’s a half marathon event on the second half of the route, Broughton, where the half starts, is a little hub of activity that you go through and serves as a great half-way boost. The nature of the trail means that the terrain, the gradient, the view and the scenery are always changing – I never got that dreaded sense of looking up a long straight road thinking the end was never going to come. And those hills? Yes, there are hills. Are they tough? Yes, some of them. Getting up Farley Mount is the tour de force but there are others that remind you of the Clarendon’s reputation. They didn’t beat us, but we did walk some of them – we weren’t alone. But you do get to enjoy the downhill that follows. Was it as fearsome as we’d been led to believe? No, I don’t think it was. Maybe we were well prepped for the hills, or maybe walking them flattened them out just enough, but in the main the feeling at the end was that it was tough but doable, it was a challenge but really enjoyable. We weren’t fast and plenty had passed us on the way, but the sense of achievement was fantastic. We’d done a marathon and in a reasonably respectable time. We’d only walked some of the uphills and never the flats or downhills. But most of all, we’d done the Clarendon, the race with a reputation.