Oslo Half Marathon

Was kinda strange this one, after the hype and excitement of Tokyo in february, this one seemed a little low key. for starters it was only a half marathon, i hadnt really done any training due to a bad knee, the crowds were almost non existent, and there was no one there to cheer me on or anything. i just turned up, ran, finished, got changed and got the tram home...all without even speaking a single word to anyone. v strange.

i was trying to work out why no one watched the race, i mean, for the first 8km, i counted 6 people watching! even downtown oslo there must have been only a few hundred, to maybe a couple of thousand at best. compared to tokyo where the whole 26 mile route was at least 5 deep full of massively enthusiastic people.

i guess the populations differ, tokyo has 12 million residents, oslo has 0.7 million, but i think that norwegians are just quite blase' about people running 42km on a sunday morning, its nothing really special here...almost an every day occurance!

anyway, the actual running part i quite enjoyed, if not the occasion, and managed to do my 2nd best time (my best being when i was 17..ahem, a few years ago) so that was pretty good. i do think that im going to take a long break from road running, maybe do a few cross country races (more fun), but mountain biking takes less out of my knees, and you get to see more scenery..and you get to sit down occasionally, then its the snowboarding season in approximately 10 weeks. so maybe thats that for a while...

2 hours after i got home i was off to the airport for a weeks training in scotland...