Bournemouth Race for Life
It was the Bournemouth Race for Life yesterday and more than 1500 people joined in – including me, my friend Georgia and my mum!
We turned up at 10.40am to join in with the mass of people clad in pink at Bournemouth gardens/pier area. There were tutus, legwarmers, glitter and even a pink genie costume!
Everyone was in good spirits, all ready to get going across that start line.
The weather was kind to us, nice and cool before turned into the hot and sticky side of things in the afternoon.
Everyone was in a good mood even though I’m sure many people had not run that far before and the thought rather overwhelming.
Georgia had been in training with our weekly runs together across the cliff tops in Bournemouth from our flat (which we coincidentally moved out of the week before!) and we’d done a few runs independently either on the treadmill at the gym or exploring the area around my new house in Christchurch.
The furthest we had run together before the race was 3.5k so needless to say we were both slightly apprehensive as to how things were going to go! We wanted to run it all but knew realistically that probably wasn’t going to happen…
The race started and as soon as they said ‘go!’ I got a nosebleed…luckily it didn’t last long and we were off!
We set off with the crowd of people across the start line, starting our playlists and clicking go on the running apps. We were going strong. My mum, having completed a ridiculous number of half marathons (about 15 I think) was sticking with us for the first part but we lost her in the crowd of people fairly quickly and left her to put us to shame by finishing before us.
We could see Boscombe pier in sight and were running fairly easily. We reached the pier and saw we still had a little further to go before turning around. At this point we were quite out of breath and had to push through until the turning point. We then decided to reward ourselves with a little walk and were very thankful to pass a lady passing out water.
We started running again and swiftly hit the ‘runners wall’ but broke through it by just keeping going and motivating each other to just KEEP RUNNING. We hit the 4k mark, the end was in sight, we knew we just had to run all of the last kilometre and we’d be done.
We did it and crossed the finish line in just over 36 minutes. Needless to say, we were pretty relieved and also quite proud of ourselves! We met up with my mum, she told us she’d done it in 29 minutes which she was happy with.
In total, we have raised £225 in contributions and £43 in gift aid with still more donations to come in the next few days! If you’d like to donate too, please visit our donation page.
The event is expected to raise £135k in total.
If running isn’t your thing, and you’re tempted I’d say this is probably the best one to start within the area.
Not too far, beautiful scenery, great camaraderie and all for a really good cause.
Why not give it a whirl!
Related Dovetail articles:
Laura’s Race for Life
