Great Manchester Run 10k

Manchester marks my 3rd best time and 2nd best for the year. Also, a lot of eating.

Sweaty but feeling accomplished. 

Why Manchester

A few reasons:

Manchester is a major UK city I haven't been to, and I only need to take one train to get to it.

Weirdly, I was interested in the Great Manchester Run because it was so expensive compared to the others. It was £38. Even though I'm trying to be frugal on these trips, I wanted to see what could be so glorious about this run for it to cost so much.

I also wanted to discover what my alternative Mancunian life would have been like. By that I mean that the University of Manchester was the only other UK university besides Edinburgh I had received an offer from. I had never visited it, though, so I've always wondered if I even would have liked the place if I ended up going there.

The journey

Finally, no drama to report. The train left 3 minutes late and arrived on time.

The only thing worth mentioning was that this train was so busy, people were already standing in the aisles from the moment we left Waverley. That's a long time to stand.

Bakery stop

My first stop after getting off the train was Pollen Bakery. I had first come across it a few months earlier in an article on the 20 best bakeries in Britain.

I can confirm it is indeed deserving of a place on this list. I got a mushroom and goats cheese roll, in addition to a ginormous pain au chocolat. Both were excellent.

Look at that beautifully folded pastry!

Science and Industry Museum

After checking into my Airbnb, I headed toward the Science and Industry Museum. It was surprisingly small for such a large building - it's built in what used to be an old railway station.

Two highlights stuck out to me. First, Baby, the world's first stored-program computer that was built at the University of Manchester. This really only stuck out because it was called Baby, which is not a name I expected for a computer.

The other good find was in the textiles area. There was a double-faced clock used in a 19th century mill. The bottom clock showed the actual time. The top clock had its hands powered by a water wheel workers had to operate.

Naturally, a working day was measured by the top clock. You literally had to work hard enough to make time move. This is why we need legislation to regulate things.

I'd literally punch that time clock if I was a mill worker.

John Rylands Library

I next made a quick stop to the John Rylands Library shortly before closing time. I didn't expect much from a visit to a library, but I'm actually sad I didn't get more time here.

It's an incredibly beautiful building from the inside and out, and I would have liked to have been able to take my time getting through the displays.

The craziest thing about this place was coming across a hen (bachelorette) party there. What an odd place to visit while wearing a sash that says Bride Tribe. But they were French, so maybe there's a cultural difference here I don't know about.

The official library of hen parties.

This was followed by an even quicker trip to see Manchester Cathedral, but I don't have anything to report here. Lincoln spoiled me on the cathedral front.

Pre-run spaetzle loading

A few weeks ago, a Guardian review for a new Manchester restaurant called The Sparrows came up in my Apple news feed.

They sell a variety of European dumplings but specialize in spatzle, which is a childhood favorite of mine from my German side of the family.

The review mentioned that it's only a 12-seater place, so I made sure to book myself a table. I got their spaetzle served with cheese and braised onion. It was delicious, it was cheap, and it was not over-portioned - so much so I opted to get their brownie for dessert. All for £9.

And yes, to confirm, I had both a (massive) pain au chocolat and brownie in the same day. I obviously needed the carbs.

The sexy side of the river

On my way back to my Airbnb, which was just north of the city in Salford, I decided to follow a route my host suggested which was to walk along the River Irwell.

I had actually already gone that way when I walked over to check-in, but this was along the south side of the river. Walking along the south side was very pleasant and calm.

Going back from The Sparrows, I managed to find myself along the north side, which was a much different experience.

First, I ended up on the north side by opting to walk through an incredibly littered underpass. This then took me face-to-face with a large group of teenagers, and as we all know, there is no scarier group of people in life than local youth.

However, I passed without incident and was walking along fine until I mildly freaked out at a rat running past me. But again, I made it through.

The path narrowed and I was surrounded by an overgrowth of shrubbery. At this point, I started to notice that there were quite a few open condom wrappers on the ground. As I kept walking, the amount of open wrappers only increased.

Then came the section full of rather explicit pornographic pictures lying on the ground.

And this, folks, is when I realized I was in an outdoor local sex spot.

Luckily, no one was there at the time, and when I got through the worst of it, there was a bridge so I could walk back over to the south side.

The whole time I kept thinking that it's a good thing New Lauren is experiencing this. Old Lauren would have been horrified. New Lauren was incredibly amused to have found herself in this situation.

Observations about Manchester

Here are some things I noticed by the end of my first day in Manchester:

1. I was completely unaware of the whole bee thing. Worker bees are the symbol of Manchester, which I've now learned traces back to the city's industrial roots when the city was a 'hive' of activity for all the 'busy bees' working there.

The bee symbolism is everywhere: on bins, on buses, on buildings. You'd think with my first stop being a place called Pollen Bakery I would have know about this, but I didn't.

Bees everything and bees everywhere.

And what great timing for this trip because May 20th is apparently World Bee Day. Happy Bee Day, everybody.

2. The pedestrian crossing lights are stupid. Well, some of them. There were so many I encountered where the red man/green man buttons are on the console you press the signal-to-cross button on. This as opposed to being directly in front of you, which means you're turning your head and holding it there to wait for it to change to green. This is absolutely killer for your neck.

Stop hurting my neck, light-up man!

3. There were geese. Lots of them. To be fair, this was more so in Salford, but still. I don't associate geese being so close to a city center.

Some geese in the river of THE INCIDENT.

Breakfast then brunch

My 10k start time on Sunday was at 1:25pm. That's quite late for a race, so I wasn't going to be able to eat breakfast at a normal time and then wait until after the run to eat a large meal. No. This body needed to both breakfast and brunch it.

Of course, I couldn't just get any brunch. A full veggie would have probably left me feeling awful. I scoured the brunch menus of Manchester far and wide to find a place where I could get porridge and/or a poached egg with toast. I found it. It was called Cafe North. I got both for £6, which I thought was very reasonable.

After fueling, I went to check out the event village and race areas so I knew where I'd be going later in the day. In retrospect, walking so much in the morning probably didn't help my run time, but I wasn't going to waste my limited time in Manchester all for a PB.

The race

There were a lot of people at the Great Manchester Run. It attracts around 30,000 runners. There's both a half marathon and a 10k, and the 10k has multiple waves spread over 2 hours.

Despite its size, it's well organized. There were signs everywhere pointing you in the right direction. There were entire streets blocked off just to hold baggage. Everything was color-coded based on you wave color. The race started exactly on time.

Even the balloons were color-coded for each wave.

It's because of its size, though, that when the race actually started, I had the most difficulty in a race so far trying to squeeze past people. When my running app told me my first half mile took over 4 minutes 50 seconds, I started to get worried.

I eventually found some empty pockets to sneak into and start to make up some time.

This was by far the loudest race I've ever experienced. From the spectators cheering, to local DJs blasting music, to helicopters hovering overhead, a playlist wasn't necessary for this run. But I tried to listen to mine anyway.

The highlight for me was the showers. They had two tents of streaming water you could run under. On a day like it was - cloudy, 59F - they weren't absolutely essential, but it still felt so good running under them.

After mile 2, I gradually started to slow down and ended finishing in 58:30. This is my 2nd best time of the year, but about half a minute slower than the Scottish 10k last year.

Sure, it would have been nice to break my 57-minute record, but on the bright side, I was feeling a hell of a lot better than I did in Lincoln and I didn't end the race in pain. In fact, I kept thinking how great my legs felt afterwards.

The goody bag for the run has definitely been the weirdest so far. They have so many sponsors, who all seemed to contribute something, so there was everything from a container of tuna steak, to a pesto pot, to a laundry detergent pod.

All the swag.

I really liked the design of the finisher's shirt (there's a bee on it!), but of course, I won't be able to go running in it because it's a size small and therefore too big for me. You can be sure I've already sent my feedback to the race organizers on this. I don't know how a race can be this big and XS is not an option.

All in all, I'd rate the Great Manchester Run as pretty great. Not sure it deserves such a hefty price tag, though.

Getting in all the steps

My accommodation was a 30-minute walk from the race area, which contributed to me having to walk around a lot. I was ready to lay down after my shower, but I headed back into town for some post-race eating.

My Airbnb hosts, it turns out, were owners of a French Canadian snackbar in town. They offered me a poutine on the house, and there was no way I was turning down that offer.

Poutine courtesy of my hosts.

It was nice and sunny out when I finished eating, and I would have loved to go on a walk to explore somewhere new, but my legs needed to rest.

I ended the day with 37,414 steps, which is excellent for the step challenge I'm in the middle of at work. 

As a comparison, my Liverpool race had the 2nd highest step count of all my 10k days with 26,613 steps. That's an extra 3.8 miles I walked around Manchester.

Checking out the alternative Mancunian life

As mentioned in the beginning of this post, back in the uni applying days nearly a decade ago, I had received an offer from the University of Manchester but had never visited the campus. Before catching my train, I walked down to check it out.

What I normally don't like about university campuses is that they're actual campuses. They're closed off bits, separate from the town/city they're in. What I always liked about Edinburgh was that it didn't seem like a campus - it was more like a few buildings part of the city center.

It even says University of Manchester on the fancy building! You would never see that at Old College.

Manchester definitely has more of a closed-campus feel, but it's also still somewhat centrally located. It has some beautiful buildings, which would have appealed to the 2010 Lauren sending in her application. 2019 Lauren who has lived in the UK for almost 8 years wonders, though, if those pretty old buildings are well insulated.

Pretty, but how does it fare in the winter?

Overall, it was a lot more attractive than some other campuses I've seen, and I think I would have been okay at Manchester had I accepted the offer. But I don't think Manchester as a city is pretty enough for my superficial tastes. Ain't nobody do pretty like Edinburgh.

Next race

Weybridge 10k

I'll be running along the River Thames, and as it turns out, it will be the south side of it. Phew.