I had spent all day trying to think up excuses not to do it and I felt sick with worry (I have no idea why - you all know by now that I'm an oddball!) but I'm glad I managed to push all the negative thoughts aside and just man up!
Once I was on the way in the car with Brenda and Tony, all the nerves went away and I started to look forward to racing.
After watching the kids race and having a brief warm up with Mark, the race got underway.
The first lap seemed to go on forever but I was feeling pretty good even though Gordon had gone flying past me with ease on the way through the woods. Laurence had also passed me but I managed to get past him again on the second ascent of the dreaded hill, although it's no longer dreaded for me and is possibly my second favourite part of the race now as I go past everyone and nobody goes past me (my favourite part of the race is going through the woods and coming out back at the start as it's undulating and you can get a good speed up).
Once at the top of the hill though, I started to feel a bit ill. My stomach really hurt and I felt like I might be sick. This lasted for about ¾ of a mile but it then passed and I started feeling good again.
Other than that brief stomach ache, I felt fairly good throughout the race and felt like I was really motoring so I was a little disappointed when I crossed the line and checked my pace - 8.30 minute mile! I felt like it should have been much faster that that. My pace last year was 8.25, although I can’t compare the race time itself as it was a different course.
After the race, my stomach got really bad. I’m not sure why, maybe it was the oats overload I had (porridge for breakfast, a flapjack with lunch and another flapjack for my pre-race snack a couple of hours before) but I couldn’t eat anything when I got home after the race and felt really ill. This might account for why I didn’t do as well as I should have, or am I just making excuses?
In an effort to start seeing more positives in my runs than negatives, I am going to start putting three points at the end of each blog post showing the positives from that day’s session so no better place to start than with today’s race.
- I did really well on all three ascensions of the hill. Looking at the segments on Strava, I have the second fastest time on that hill and the people below me have faster times than me on the other sections of the course, which shows that I'm getting much better at hills!
- I had a strong finish and felt really good during the last mile or so.
- I actually did it, even though I had been trying to talk myself out of it all day.
Total distance - 4.3 miles + warm up and cool down
http://www.strava.com/activities/176871047/overview
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