I live in London. It’s one of the best cities in the world to live in. We have pretty much everything here. If I wanted to eat sushi and doughnuts at 1am in the morning, I could probably find somewhere willing to deliver them to my door in less than an hour. If I want to see an obscure arthouse film about raising yaks in Uzbekistan on a Wednesday afternoon, I’m pretty confident I could find somewhere that one would be showing – with or without subtitles. But if I want to run a half marathon, then my options are much more limited.

More than 8.3million people live in London. For all those people there’s just a handful of  half marathons I could name. And if we don’t count Royal Parks Half Marathon – because it has a ballot entry system – that list is even shorter. So when a half marathon is held in my city I want it to be good, I want it to be well supported, have an exciting route and a course with PB potential. I want it to do well.

I ran the Run To The Beat half marathon in Greenwich at the weekend as a guest of Nike. I didn’t have to pay the £50 entry fee that left a lot of people on Twitter disappointed with the race. The race organisers took the decision to refund everyone £10 of their entry fee because of the general bad feeling that had been voiced. It was a nice gesture but the money isn’t the issue – the months of training and hard work that resulted in a disappointing race was the issue.

For my part I was using the race as a training run rather than hunting down a PB. Had I been hunting down a PB I certainly wouldn’t have chosen this race in the first place – a look at the course elevation and the size of the field should be enough to tell you this wasn’t a place to go looking for your fastest ever time. So complaints about the massive hill at the finish were a bit lost on me –always look at an elevation profile before you enter a race. It wasn’t pleasant running up a massive hill in mile 12, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone.

I’d been placed in a start pen that was quicker than I was anticipating, but there were a lot of people in my pen that looked equally out of place. Even so, I placed myself at the back of the pen . I took it steady in the first few miles and had a steady stream of people running past me – but some runners were being unnecessarily reckless in their eagerness to cut through the crowds resulting in a few trips and me shouting at a guy to calm down because he was being an idiot. He couldn’t hear me, he was wearing headphones.

By mile seven I hit a wall of people. There was a lot of bad pacing on display in the race and as I hit the second half of the race, all those eager beavers who’d rushed past at the start were now slowing and walking. Now I was weaving through runners and feeling frustrated.

I know that further back in the field there was a massive bottleneck going into the Woolwich Barracks. People reported waiting five minutes or more to get through a gate with it later being cut out altogether resulting in a 400m shortfall in the course length for some runners. This was bad planning by the race organisers.

But the point I want to make is that it’s all our responsibilities to make sure a race is successful. A race organiser needs to deliver an accurately measured course with appropriate aid along the way, but we as runners have a responsibility too. Getting your pacing right, putting yourself in the right starting position and generally not being an idiot will all help. While the race organisers have a lot to learn from this year’s RTTB, the runners taking part might have too. Because there’s not enough half marathons on my doorstep, and I want the ones that we have to be great for everyone taking part.