RACES
THE JOURNEY TO THE SUPERHALFS
The journey to the SuperHalfs
Many runners are being wooed by the concept of running six half marathons in six beautiful European destinations for one enormous medal. Let’s find out all about it…
Words: Gill Bland
The story of the SuperHalfs begins with Carlo Capalbo, who founded the Prague marathon with the help of Emil Zatopek and formed the RunCzech group. The thought of a Half Marathon series came up over conversations in the pub and just wouldn’t go away. He had a hunch that the Half Marathon was the sweet spot for an exciting chance to encourage runners to new destinations across Europe.
For UK runners, Cardiff is the perfect start on the SuperHalf journey The RunCzech team kept coming back to the idea until one year, the results of some research about runners’ preferences for travel and race distance were released while they were at a global running conference. This gave them both hard evidence and the chance to check their workings with industry peers. Everything confirmed their thinking: the 10K was generally thought to be too short to travel for and conversely the marathon was too much, meaning you had to build your whole trip around the big day, but a half marathon – that was just the right distance to be able to justify the journey but still be able to soak up the culture of a new city and even bring family along. It was time to turn an idea into reality.