Pike!

After doing the timing at the race at weekend, I decided today to give the route a go and see what kind of time I could do it in.  I wasn't going to be too bothered if it was slower than I thought because I had a lot of gates to open which would all be open for me on the day (five on the way up, five on the way down) plus you're always faster in races when you're being dragged along by others.  I anticipated that I could do it under 30 minutes but unfortunately, an incredibly poor performance on the way up didn't allow that to happen.

I don't know what was wrong with me today but I had no climb in my legs at all.  My calves were throbbing and I started walking not long after the school and then run/walked all the way up from there.  Normally I can at least run to the middle of the farm field before walking to George's Lane and then running up the Pike but today I was really tired.  My aim wasn't to be able to run the whole thing because I know that on some bits it's actually faster, at my level, to walk than run and I wanted to get up as quickly as I could but I definitely should have been able to get up a lot faster than I did.

My aim was to get up in under 18 minutes as I knew I could get down in under 12 but I got up in 20 minutes 49 seconds which I was really disappointed with and know that I'm more than capable of doing better than that.

I got down in 10 minutes 58 seconds which I was quite pleased with but there's definitely room for improvement as there were a couple of points where I felt like I was holding back a little and could have gone faster.  Also, there were the five gates to get through.

As everybody has said, the road at the bottom is the hardest bit and by now I was knackered and my pace had dropped considerably.  When I finally got to the bus stop I had to have a sit down for a minute before jogging home.

On my cool down on the way home, Dave J came along on his bike (and caught me walking instead of running!!!).  He suggested that next time I should go up the Pike as a warm up before then doing it again at race pace.  I get where he's coming from because that would get my legs used to going uphill and warmed up for it.  Next time I have a try, I think I'll take Dave's advice however, at my level, I think going all the way up to the Pike as a warm up would be a bit much but I could just go as far as the farm field and see how that works out.

I'm determined to get my overall time to around 28 minutes so watch this space...


Total distance (includes warm up and cool down) approximately 5 miles.