I finished 15th in just over 71.30 in the Bristol Half this year, all in all I'm quite happy with that. I made a slow to steady start, and was a little down from where I wanted to be after the first mile, but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing. I made limited progress through the field, and although I felt I should be a little further up, perhaps that was just over optimistic thinking. I could see Scott H. and Mark Jenkins, the lad from Bideford ahead, but there wasn't really a line of runners to work through.

I was a bit lucky in that a couple of athletes with really low numbers on were just ahead off me at the far end of the Portway, and that helped me keep going. A runner from Hallamshire and Chris I. , the shorter of the two Cirencester runners I recognise, came past on the way back down the Portway, and I didn't make a very good job of staying with their pace, it was only later on that Chris got away, but I wasn't really attacking the last few miles of the course. The section through the city is quite slow, with a "Chariots of Fire" (the race around the quad scene - Gary Hope was first to notice!) section around Queens Square, to be honest I think this all helped me if anything.

It was a good local turnout, even if some of the top athletes aren't fully fit. Jamie Plumb was running again after four years, and I haven't seen Rob Whitham and Tom K. run so well over such a long distance, and Oli was ticking over in the way top tri-athletes do. Andy Harrison was going nicely, and Martin Hula is quality all over. There are fairly strict rules on who counts as a local runner, so I might be in with a shout of a prize there. I've given up trying to work out how many M40s are ahead of me, some of them look a lot younger than me now!

In the womens race Lucy H. (or at least nee H.) was a close second, Sian was watching, I'm sure she'll be fitter in a while. Mike was happy with the way the B&W teams ran.

Now it's four weeks to the Royal Victoria Marathon Half in Canada, and I there's some fine tuning to be done. I'm hoping to race over the next two weekends (it's the 6 stage next week), and then have a reasonable lifestyle on my business trip.

...and this is the first post I've written on my Eee PC, a brilliant device that lets me write in bed, and I got before I go to Canada. I suppose you could argue it joins the list of toys; N95, Eee PC and Kawai, although at least the Kawai adds a little culture to my life of engineering and running.