As you would guess from the name of this race it starts smack, bang in the middle of the (old) Severn Bridge which is safe to say is pretty impressive. I assume the logistics of closing a major motorway are not easy but it did mean we had the most impressive start line to a race that I have ever been part of. The fact it was a hot, sunny day helped. I imagine it wouldn't have been as pleasant being exposed on the bridge on a wet and windy day!
Back to the beginning though... After driving across the new Severn Bridge, there was a rather large queue to get parked and then a 10ish minute walk to the race village. The village itself was very well organised with lots of portaloos as well as every male runners favourite sight before a race: porta-urinals which meant no queueing for that all important pre-race wee. Number collection was straight forward enough.
The Finish line was in the race village but the Start line was half way across the bridge so another good 10-15 minute walk away. All in all 20-25 minutes of walking to get to the start line seems excessive but in fairness I couldn't see any way it could be avoided with such an original start position.
Once the race got underway (about 5 minutes late as we had to wait for the all clear on road closures) we ran for about a mile and half on the eastbound carriage way before heading off into country lanes for the next 8 miles, which meant there wasn't a huge amount of local support. To be fair this large chunk of the race wasn't much to write home about and.
At the half way point there is a rather large hill (about 150ft climb in half a mile) which took its toll. The next 3 miles were downhill before the final stretch was back on to the bridge. At this point, the half marathon and 10k (which started shortly after the HM) converged which made things pretty congested, especially as the quicker HM runners were merging with slower 10k runners. To make matters worse, the return leg over the bridge was not on the motorway but actually on the cycle path fenced in alongside the motorway.
This race had one of the strangest finishes I have been through, but again I guess this is due to the logistics around using the bridge. As mentioned earlier the finish was in the race village, but to get to it from the bridge you had to double back on yourself, go through an underpass and then run uphill on a narrow path through some trees to get to the finish line. Definitely not good for a sprint finish.
Medal, t-shirt and goody bag were all of a good standard.
There were 3 water stations along the route with water being distributed in bottles which is always preferable to plastic cups.
The question I always ask myself after a race is would I run it again. The answer for this one is probably not. It was a well organised event and as mentioned a pretty unique setting and I would definitely recommend it to first timers, but there wasn't enough for me to go back and do it again.