A lovely cloudy day to start off with. Easy to get parked in the free parking provided by Royal London and plenty of marshals sorting the cars out. Nice "village" area in the grounds of Royal London with registration, food, drink, pop up shop, on cloud shoes trial but no toilets. Toilets were down at the end of the start funnel which was a bit of a walk to be honest. Race got underway but everyone was squeezed onto one carriageway of the road so there was a lot of bunching and it was difficult to get into running until we hit the actual bypass. i think they should have used both lanes of the road. Once on the bypass every KM or so there was different music being played, from Madness to Depeche Mode to drummers and buskers. All very good and very welcome. The turn around point had the water station but wasn't too congested. On the run back the sun appeared and it started to get rather warm. The organisers have changed the date for next years race to May to avoid the heat - nice move! Once over the finish line you were presented with the excellent medal, technical tshirt, flapjack and water if you wanted it. The organisers were trialing a bring your own bottle but it didn't look like many had judging from the runners bottles table. Nice idea though and maybe it will catch on and save plastic waste.

The only downside to the whole thing was the parking. not for me though, but a couple of runners who had a Land Rover discovery which had been boxed in by the marshals allowing parking where parking wasn't allowed. With a lot of patience and centimeters to spare we managed to get the Discovery out but it was really tight. Not a good idea to box people in.

Other than that it was a very good morning and I'd recommend folk give this one a go especially as it's in May next year which will be cooler.