Scene of the Great Jelly Baby Massacre

I don't quite understand the combined properties of piss, a seedy pub or a Mancunian Night Club gents toilet floor and that tacky feeling underfoot, the kind of feeling that makes your wrists and hands rise and retract like a T-Rex's vestigial paws, in an attempt to avoid touching anything...other than yourself. From that point, it's all elbows and feet as you make your exit, teeth clenched with each crackling foot step wondering what on earth makes a floor so sticky.

Sticky like you imagine wet glue to be...or in fact, sticky like a gel station on a mega marathon event, tacky bitumen under your feet that actually requires a tangible increase in effort to break traction from drying gloopy residue littering the road for a good half mile. There's something very unpleasant about it, way more ugly than splashing through cow shit or similar. There's a point on the Wilmslow Half, just before mile 10, which is a barometer of how the last 3 are going to pan out.

How you make it up the hill, punctuated with 90 degree corners, past the pub and across the 10 mile mat, determines your destiny. It's tricky. Hold back and potentially waste time, or push on and fail to recover on the flat. Who knows until you try? But this section starts in the dip, the bottom of the hill just through Mobberley village. The memories are traumatic. A few years ago, the locals had a well staffed stall, an army of kids dishing out vast and overly generous handfuls of Jelly Babies.

A Jelly Baby is a runners saviour in times of desperate need. Mile 10 is that point, the turning point, the making or breaking of your race...before the bastard hill. On this particular year, I was recovering from a back operation, and ran 'gently' shall we say. So I was back in the pack. Down the dip we ran. Then the senses went into overload. First the vision of the stall, but then confusion, everyone looking down, yet holding out there hands out awaiting their gifts of life. Lots of side stepping in all directions, an occasional squeal.

Then 'that' feeling underfoot. That stinking gents toilet feeling. Sticky. You look down...and carnage. Fallen heroes. Jelly Babies who missed their intended targets, lying on the floor, looking up at you, their smiley face grinning...but many, their faces flattened and embedded in the road, some with crushed legs, other missing heads. Runners ahead now trying to find a safe place to land their feet, and then you feel it too. 'Ugggh', a similar sound of dejection as if you'd stepped in dog shit, but with the added trauma of talking a sugary life.

The children looked on, dishing more and more out, happy, giddy, relentless in their need to lift our spirits, overfilling our hands with a generosity that was overshadowed by the colourful demise and fall from grace to become a sad Jelly Bean version of roadkill. The scene of the Great Jelly Baby Massacre, as we now refer to it, is where my race turned this year. I couldn't hang on to Janine any longer, she pulled away and claimed an eventual 10th Lady. I trudged in some 30 seconds behind. Still, a new PB for me. And a great race, nicely prepared and very well motivated.