There’s three things I look for when choosing a race: that they’re cheap, easy to get to and well organised. At £21 and a half hour train journey away from London, Maidenhead Half Marathon looked like a good prospect and the relatively flat course had PB potential all over it.

The race began in the town centre, just a couple of minutes from the station. The ‘race village’ (bag drop, portaloos, registration and a massage tent) was in a rather unglamorous carpark between some office buildings, but this, thankfully, wasn’t indicative of the scenery we could expect on the course.

Signs indicating where runners should line up had been erected at the start and I dutifully placed myself by the 1:45 sign, keen to take a sizable bite out of my existing (but two year’s old) 1:56 PB. Although barriers had been placed along the start, a gap in these allowed late comers to rush in to the front as the start got underway – a large number of them starting too near the front for their pace.

After what sounded like a cannon fired 2,000 runners were off to a very congested start. The streets of the town centre narrowed and runners jostled for position. Just before the first mile marker the route passed through an underpass under a busy road, the course narrowing to allow us to pass through just two-by-two for a time. I looked at my watch: 8:45 for mile 1 when I’d been aiming for 8 minute miles all the way. This alone was the only hiccup of the race.

The route took us through residential areas, along the river, and past fields. It had a good combination of countryside scenery and the crowd support that residential areas offer. The course consisted of two loops so friends and family had a good opportunity to see you a couple of times. Importantly this didn’t mean going through the finish area until it was time to finish, the second loop starting a mile out from the centre of town.

The marshalls on the route were full of cheer, there was ample water available on the course and a nice medal for finishers. We passed back through the same underpass on our way back to the finish but at this stage it was no trouble to the thinned out field.

There were a couple of short undulating sections that sought to break your pace, but nothing too taxing. And the near perfect conditions on the day (a bit of breeze and good cloud cover) meant that a PB was looking promising. I had, however, made a rookie mistake of not starting my watch properly as I crossed the start. With no idea of how long had elapsed after me crossing the start and correcting this mistake, as I came into the home stretch I didn’t know for sure that I’d broken 1:45 (the race clock reading 1:45:35).

Regardless of the official results, I’d told myself that the congested first mile and being forced to stop and wait to get under the underpass had caused at least 35 seconds delay in my time. But I wanted an official sub-1:45. Fortunately the results were up the very next morning and it was confirmed, my time was 1:44:40. All was forgiven Maidenhead – a 1:45:02 would, however, have been a different story.