The days prior to a race should be spent resting up, drinking plenty of fluid and eating well. So that’s what I did. I laid in bed for two whole days straight shivering, sweating and aching; ate handfuls of ibuprofen tablets; and drank plenty of Lemsip. I had a cold and the Saturday night prior to the race I most definitely wasn’t taking part. But on Sunday morning, not feeling too shabby, I decided I may as well put my running kit on and see how things went from there.

It really isn’t too clever to race if you’ve been ill so I have to put in bold: Don’t try this at home!

The best laid plans of mice and runners are liable to get messed up by seasonal viruses, so with a PB very much not mine for the taking, the plan now was to stick with a couple of injured guys who were aiming to bring it home in just under two hours.

We set off past Ron Hill and Sally Gunnell who were starting the event led out by Liz Yelling who would go on to win the women’s race. My legs felt good and had forgotten all about (and forgiven me for) the Nottingham marathon four weeks earlier. My chest, however, wasn’t as keen to be out of bed and running a half-marathon.

At around two miles my friend Katie who had picked her way through the crowd caught up with us, so our merry band of four carried on towards the first support crew stop of the day. Between the four of us we saw our support crews weilding jelly beans and offering high-fives about ten times round the course which is what makes local events pretty great.

At half way Neil, our pacesetter and motivator, told us to pick up the pace. But the previous four miles of testing out whether 9 minute miling was a conversational pace by gossiping with Katie had taken their toll and, while my legs were keen, my lungs were already protesting.

Somewhere in the next couple of miles Katie dropped off the back slightly and I stopped communicating in anything other than grunts and hand signals. By mile 11 I was mentally hanging on to Neil and Steve, and using them to hide from the wind. But with a mile to go it was clear we were going to come home in under two hours.

With one last surge the three amigos got our gun time as well as our chip time under the two hour mark, crossing the line together holding hands. Katie was just a minute behind us to bag herself a new half-marathon PB and join the sub-two crew.

The lesson I take away from this race isn’t that it’s possible to race after you’ve been wiped out with a cold for two days. It’s that having a couple of good pacers can make a huge difference – if not to your performance, then certainly to your enjoyment of a race. If I’d run this alone it probably would have been a pretty miserable day at the office.