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JP Morgan Corporate Challenge 2014

I have signed up for this twice before but been injured this time. This year I forgot to sign up but luckily one of my colleagues dropped out so I took his place. This is a huge event with about 15,000 runners each day! As soon as I left the office I saw other people heading to the event and it was huge when I got there!

I was in the red start, which was the second pen, and I was there in good time so was maybe about 1/3 of the way back. The start was well staggered with 5 minutes between each wave, so there was no congestion at the start. I think that the people around me were aiming for a slightly faster time than me (I don't know what finish time red equated to) and I was being passed consistently for the first half of the race, usually considerately, but not always!

I set off and was running at my target pace of 8:20mm. The course was generally wide with few bottle necks and while we had to slow slightly to go around corners occassionally I never felt like I lost much time at these points. After a mile I was about 10 seconds ahead of pace, but then I got to a slightly uphill section and over the next mile slipped backuntil I was about 5 seconds down. Then I got to another downhill section and managed to get back up to about 10 seconds ahead. I was very hot, and a few people after the race remarked that out Hogan Lovells shirts were very warm!

The end is quite painfully deceptive as it looks as though you are reaching the end, but then you have to do a fairy long lap of a field to get there. I managed a reasonable sprint up the last straight to finish in 29:01 on my watch, which showed a distance of 3:52 miles and 19 seconds ahead of my virtual parter for 8:15 average pace which I was pleased with given the lack of trianing recently.

This was a very fun race and was astonishingly well organised given the numbers. I had heard in the past that it was congested, but I didn't find that to be the case. I would do it again next year if I wasn't abandoning London.

8:08, 162
8:29, 173
8:14, 182
(8:01, 189)