PBs are supposed to go down, not up right? Not mine. This week my personal best for 26.2 miles went from 3:38:08 to 3:42:30 without me having to put on a running shoe. It’s pretty annoying to say the least.

Back in 2013 I ran Manchester Marathon. I was wanting to get a London Marathon Good For Age time. At the start of the race, though, we weren’t sure what the new time was going to be. London had announced that they were changing the qualification standard but not yet said what the new time goals were. The only option was to run as fast as I could and hope for the best. So I did.

I crossed the finish line and stopped my watch at 3:38. I noticed that my Garmin hadn’t quite clicked over to 26.2 miles but this is normal on a course with some hairpin turns and GPS aren’t 100% accurate so I thought no more about it.

London announced the new GFA level for women my age as 3:45 so I was in by a fair margin.

Three years on and there’s been an investigation into the course in Manchester. You can read more about that here. It looks like it might have been short by 380m for 2013 to 2015.

Three years on it’s my own fault that that 3:38 was still the fastest I’d run a marathon. I could have got it together to knock a few minutes off that somewhere. But now it doesn’t count for much at all.

I did a rough bit of maths in my head when I heard the news 380m – I reasoned that at the end of a marathon, sprinting for the line (which I remember doing and my parents were witness to) I’d have covered that distance in 2 mins or less. So for my own amusement and nothing more, I thought 3:40:something would be about right.

Then I got an email from the Marathon.

“We have worked with our race result service providers to provide you with an updated time for the event. We have used the short distance and your pace in the last 6 miles to calculate your full distance time.

Your original 2013 time was 03:38:08
Your adjusted 2013 time is 03:41:14”

I’m sorry but your maths is wrong. 3 mins to do 380m? As Autumn said on Twitter “You’ve done 400m faster than that after downing a pint.”

Phil got an email too. They his 4:43 was ‘adjusted’ to 4:52. That’s 9 minutes. It takes about 4-5 mins to walk round a 400m track and he was not walking at the end of that marathon.

I know that some people need an adjusted time. Like me, a lot of people would have run this race trying to gain GFA or Boston Qualifying times. As far as GFA goes, you can only use races that happened in the past 2 years (and Boston is a shorter window) so those 2013 and 2014 results are redundant now. There’s no need to adjust them.

In my mind neither of those times count. If someone asks me now what my marathon PB is, I’d go to my next best race in Copenhagen last year. 3:42:30. But that’s when I start to get annoyed. With nobody other than myself though.

I could have run faster in Copenhagen. I finished disappointed with my time. There was a point around 18 miles where I stopped pushing, it was hot, it was hard and I’d run 18 miles. I remember thinking “Meh, I wouldn’t be that much under 3:38, may as well relax.” A few miles down the line I realised I’d need to put my foot down to collect a new GFA qualifier (Manchester having expired), so I did.

If I’d known then that that 3:38 didn’t count, I’d have run faster than 4:42. How much faster, I don’t know. But there’s only one way to find out, I guess.