After a hugely successful Nationwide Building Society Swindon Half 2017, we’ve now finalised a date for the 2018 race, which will be Sunday the 9th Sept 2018.
We’re in the process of finalising a couple of slight tweaks to the course based on feedback from this year’s race, but the general outline will remain largely the same, and it will still start at the County Ground, and finish in Town Centre.
The tweaks to the course will result in us needing to lose around 120m from the finish end of the race, which will mean we can now finish on Commercial road, which we actually think works better as it’ll mean you can now see the finish straight from the point at which you leave Regent Circus, and will make the finish much more grand as we can have commercial road to ourselves for the race.
For this year’s race, even given the somewhat challenging weather, we had several thousand people lining Commercial road and the Wharf green area, so you can only imagine how good the atmosphere would’ve been on a dryer day with a nice long, straight finish chute on the road.
We’ll upload the map once the tweaks are approved and finalised, but it’ll only effect around three quarters of a mile to a mile of the course itself, and will be both better for competitors, spectators and for the general flow of traffic around the town during the race.
We’re also in discussions with the Bus Companies to lay on specific earlier race buses, and hopefully a park and ride too, which will mean the race can start earlier than this year’s 11am as public transport will be available for competitors and spectators to use earlier than it normally is on a Sunday, which it wasn’t this year, hence the later start.
Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be opening up applications for the Free entries for the Charity ‘Atmosphere stations’ through our Facebook page as well as some exciting new prospects for companies to get on board as race sponsors. Nationwide will continue, of course, as the title sponsor, but we have lots of ways that other companies can still get involved to promote themselves and to help the race through our partner charity opportunities, whereby companies can also get their employees involved racing on the day if they so choose.
Entries for next year’s race will open online on Nov 1st, and the early bird period will run until Jan 1st.
We were blown away with the amount of sign-ups for this year’s race for a brand new event in it’s first year (2,700 signed up), and although we’re aiming this race to grow into something with a large number of runners over a three to four year period, in the interest of growing steadily, the 2018 race will be limited to 4,000 runners.
In the early part of next year, we’ll be able to announce details on our kids and family race, which will take part on the same day, but obviously over a much shorter distance, and we really hope that this will enable to the whole family to get involved in the Swindon Half Experience.
We hope to see all of you racing with us next year, and we’ll even try and book in some slightly nicer weather for you all this time too 🙂
For more information visit: facebook.com/newswindonhalf
