Oxford Half Marathon 2017 – Volunteering

A few weeks ago I’ve seen a post on Facebook in one of the running groups that a lady was looking for Volunteer team mates. She was planning to get 15 people to help out at the upcoming Oxford Half.

I never volunteered before, but in return to spend almost a whole day volunteering we were going to get a free entry one of  the upcoming Virgin Sport’s race. The available races are : Hackney half, British 10k and Oxford half.

I signed up straight away, because helping out and make others race awesome is already a great feeling, but also getting a free entry for a running race. It was hard to say no.

I’ve messaged my sister straight away asking if she wanted to take part as well. She said yes 🙂

The race was on the 8th of October, and we had to be there by 7.30am. Which meant we needed to leave Basingstoke at 6am. Way to early on a Sunday, but I was thinking about the bigger picture.

Luckily I was able to park in a pub’s car park and because the roads were closed I could have stayed there for the whole duration. Didn’t need to worry about the car at all.

We were station at the Lucozade station n3, which was roughly 9.7 miles into the race.

The rest of the team was lovely, and it turned out all of them were from Oxford and they working for the same company.

Our ‘boss’ handed out the uniform we had to wear for the day. It was a read high visible vest and a white Oxford half cap. At the end of the day we were able to keep the cap but not the vest.

We had thousands and thousands of Lucozade bottles, all 500ml and we had to portioned them out by roughly 100mls. It wasn’t a hard job but took a long time.

Working hard filling up the cups: 

When the race started my sister and I decided how to organise the re-fills. We agreed that she goes from right to  left ton the table and when she runs out a section of Lucozade I had to be fast to re fill them.

The race started at 9.30am but we haven’t seen the first runner till after around 10.15am. but after that we didn’t have time to stop.

We also cheered on the runners and give them all the motivation and support we could have.  Looking at them they were absolutely great about our work, and loads and loads of them thanked us. It felt really good to help them out and keep them going.

We finished our day roughly around 12.30pm, then done a quick tidy up and rubbish collection, said good-bye to the others then we were on our way back to Basingstoke.

The journey to home took a bit longer because loads of roads were still closed in Oxford, but as soon as we were on the motorway the journey time went back to normal.

I think I will keep an eye on the volunteering opportunities because it was absolutely awesome and had a lovely day there .

Love,