Moray Marathon Madness

I know most people have heard enough of this story by now but I just thought I’d type something up from my true perspective.

On the morning of Sunday the 4th September, I started off the Moray Marathon course. I guessed the field wasn’t the strongest so in first mile of the race, I’d already made a considerable gap on the others. Around 3 mile into the race the Lead car turned left towards Elgin and went that way for 2 miles. I never questioned this as my bearing aren’t great at the best of times. However the car slowed down so I guessed someone had contacted the driver and told him he was going the wrong way. He then told me that the Marshall had sent us the wrong way. As I was in the lead, I had the furthest to return. By the time I’d got back to the junction the other runners were now on the route.

So with this in mind, I worked my way through the other runners, questioning marshalls along the way to work out how many people I still had to go by to try to get back to the front. I was annoyed but just got my head together and tried to push back through for 1st place.

Around 13 miles into my race, I realised I had 17 miles to go. However I pushed on to the front of the now 1st place (With around 15 miles to go) and tried to maintain pace. When reaching the last junction, the marshalls at this point, gave me the option to take a shorter, more direct route (suggested by the organisers). I however, out of principle, took the official route even though I knew it would be just over 30 miles.

Obviously, sending runnners on the wrong route is a fairly bad mistake and a lot of runners, at the time, were annoyed. However, the organisers were very apologetic and it’s one of those “these things happen” situations.

As most people know, I don’t usually win races so, I am very pleased with the win and, on the positive, I know I’m capable of doing a short ultra race in the future.

On a side note, these mishaps, happen more than expected. This shouldn’t put anyone off doing this race. It would be a shame for a race like this to disappear on the basis of this mishap.