How to be a marshal!

Today, we had the opportunity to experience a half marathon from behind the scenes.  We'd volunteered as marshals at the Events to Live, Surrey Badger Half Marathon. The first thing I noticed about being a marshal is you can have ANYTHING you want for breakfast, no sensible porridge or bananas required, so we tucked into tea and toast!

We arrived at Denbies (expecting to be placed in the safe haven of the registration desk- you don't need much of a skill set to hand out race numbers, we could cope with that) but were asked if we'd mind running a water station. As experienced runners, we both knew exactly what makes a water station stand out as either a good or a bad one.

 

1.After driving to your allocated spot, assemble the tables in a Chuckle Brothers 'to me, to you' style. Make sure your table is level by using stones to even up the ground. (NOTE:Try not to be too envious of the marshal station ahead who may have cones, thus making their station seem far more important!!)

2. Carefully fill all the water cups to the exact same amount. It helps to take a precision engineer with you for last minute adjustments to water levels.

 3. Make sure you have everything ready well before time. Those with OCD issues may struggle with this as you will want to have all your cups lined up in single file, you must put aside all OCD tendencies and try and cram as many water cup on the table as you can.

4. Ensure your gels are lined up in order and flavour.

 5. Make sure your jelly babies are arranged in a pretty pattern- this is very important as the success of the race depends on this . Then there should be time for water station action practise. We decided
to also practise what we'd do when people came running up, you can see our training video here.

6. Once everything is ready, it's now time to relax and await the first runners to come through. We were given cheese rolls, crisps and chocolate bars to keep us fuelled and awake!

7. Once the race is underway, be prepared for anything, dogs walking in front of runners, runners with cut arms, runners who look like they are about to pass out. We were hopefully, loud, cheery, smiley and happy on our water station. Most runners thanked us, the very fast runners have no time or smiles for us lowly marshals, it was great to get a thank you and a smile from sweaty runners. It was really important to make sure that there was enough water available and that filled cups were out on the tables at all times. We had two giving out water and one refilling!

8. Once the last runners have gone through, relax and start the big clear up.

9. Don't forget to look for plastic cups in hedges, ditches and in places you don't expect!! Clear up and go home!







We had a great fun morning, manning (and womaning) the water station. It was a great insight into being a marshal and I'd love to do it again. Being a runner helped as we know how rubbish it is when stations don't have enough cups out! I worked with a brilliant team (Steve and my daughter Amy) and best of all we had great fun doing it!!