Kevin Deakes 2nd best over 50 with a personal best of 2:54:08 in Mersey Marathon

He tells his own story of the race in which he reached half way in 01:24:08 and 20 miles in 2:10:13

The race began in Birkenhead Park while there was still quite a chill in the air, but other than that conditions were perfect. I probably went off a bit too quick because the Wirral 10K was held at the same time and we all started together, and of course I got dragged along with everyone else.

By about the 6 mile mark, when the 10K runners split off I was running alongside a pair of local runners intending to maintain a 6:30 min/mile pace. We were then joined by another runner as we reached New Brighton.

We all stayed together through the Mersey tunnel and that helped with the long climb out to the other side and into Liverpool. We exited the tunnel to the sound of Samba Drums which appeared to spur a couple of the runners beside me to increase their speed. I chose to carry on at the same pace and pretty soon I caught them up again.

By the time we had covered about 15 miles our group was down to three and it stayed that way until the one final climb on the course at about 18 miles. Here I dropped the other two runners and ran the rest of the race on my own save for passing the odd one or two slowing down ahead of me.

I was fine until about 23 miles when I finally began to struggle and lost a few places but fortunately the remainder of course was mainly downhill and I was able to drag myself across the finish line in what turned out to be 31st place.