Discussion: Marathon build up

Hi Mike,
Hope things are going well.
I'm doing London this year and was looking up half marathons, saw Retford, looked up the results and found you and Rob!
Is it a good one for this purpose and are you doing it again?
Any other reccomendations for other races would be cool too.

Todd, good to hear from you. Retford isn't a bad course, but there wasn't really a strong field, and as you can see from the results, Rob and I were running on our own for pretty much the whole race. It's still a good build up race though. I'm running Wilmslow on 25th March instead which has a quality field because it's the England Half Marathon Champs, but unfortunately I think the race might be full.

I've also run Stafford 20 in my marathon build up, that's a decent race and it's on 11th March. But I'm doing Trafford 10k that day, which is supposed to be a good course with a good field as well.

There is also the South Yorkshire Half marathon which Paul and I ran last year as part of the build up and that was a useful race. I think there are plenty of options, it's just fitting them all into the training.