Despite running half marathon/half marathon + distances consistently every weekend for over a month, Sunday was my first official race. I chose to take part in the MK Festival of Running 2018 Half Marathon as it's only a few minutes down the road from where I live, and I figured that MK would be a relatively flat course.  The weather has been utterly vile recently so I was pleasantly surprised to find that Sunday was warm and sunny and finally felt like a proper spring day! The race itself had a nice downhill section to begin with and then felt pretty flat all the way round until...the HILL OF DOOM at the very end.  The last mile required us to run up Campbell Hill and good grief, I cannot imagine a worse hill to do at that point in the race.  Most people seemed to be power-walking or slow jogging up it and I did a mixture of the two.  Thankfully, the finish line was flat so I was able to do a sprint finish...hurrah. In terms of times, I wanted under ...