I got my place from another runner who had double booked herself. The transfer process was pretty straight forward. As London was the only other marathon I had done previously I felt the price of Manchester was a little steep in comparison. Having said that I know there are others, which are far more expensive. The race bib arrived in the post so that took some of the stress out of having to go to an expo or pick it up on race day. As expected getting to the race village would be busy so it makes sense to get the tram as early as possible because it gets extremely crowded. Bag drop took a while to negotiate but the walk to the start areas is pretty straight forward. The queues for the toilets were extremely long in the start pens. When people started gathering in the pens you couldn't tell where the queue for the loos were. Also I felt there weren't enough on the course as it took me a while to find a reasonable short queue for the toilets. I had to ask a marshal where my start pen as it wasn't particularly obvious where it was when trying to get through the crowds. I'm used to going to events where the start pens are "fenced off" so it's obvious where one starts and another begins.

The course itself is quite flat and its potential to get marathon PBs was spot on, as I managed to knock nearly 14 mins off my London time. The support from the crowds for most of the way was great but as with any big events you will get bits where there aren't that many to get you through the tough parts of the race. It was quite amusing to be greeted by a giant tortoise and a parrot on the way round, as we passed a pet shop.

The medal and tshirt were great, as were the post race foil blankets and soreen. My only other gripe was the sports massage tent. I was queuing for about 20 mins before being told that they weren't taking on any more people. This isn't ideal when you have stopped completely after the marathon and there were still another hour or so worth of runners to come through who would have appreciated a post race massage too (I had finished the marathon in 5:14:56). Given there was a reported 15,000+ runners on the day and some runners had two sports massage therapists working on their legs at one time it was a bit poorly planned.