Saturday 27 November 2010

My UKA Sefton Park X/C Challenge

This was going to be a real marathon challenge for me!

First a hard night shift, dragging heavy cages of stock onto the shop floor followed by filling the shelves of the pet food aisle [ think 15k bags of dog food etc, they gave me this assignment because I'm fit! Thanks guys!!!].
I managed two and a half hours in bed before I had to get up, eat breakfast, do some warm up exercises and trigger point massage, then it was time to meet Tracey and Steve for the lift to the race.

It's always good fun traveling with Trace as she is very accident prone and something funny always happens to her, ie; falling down mud filled ditches in 1/2 marathon races and ending up looking like the swamp monster, getting lost before the start of a race and getting into a fight with the clubs tent and ending up worse for wear at the last X/C meet are just a few of the many bizarre things that happen in Tracey's World!

OK BACK TO THE RACE

Oh Man it was cold, brass monkey weather, the ground was frozen rock hard under the grass.

This was a National race series and included many of the countries elite runners.

The start was very fast as you can imagine, I was hoping to stay with team mates Steve McLean and Neil but my legs did not have the speed to keep up.

Once I was fully warmed up I found myself gradually overtaking runner after runner, I was quite enjoying myself running at my own pedestrian pace.

As you can see from the video below the course ducks and weaves its way through the trees at times making it quite fun!

3 laps and 10K seemed like a long way and I was pleased to cross the finish line, finishing with an average pace of 6.17 but almost a min slower than last year.

Last year I followed Pete Magill’s advice of doing only one hard session on a race week, it worked well leaving me feeling fresh and strong, this time I just ran through the race putting in 3 hard sessions in the week!

I plan to target the Beacon Park X/c in a couple of weeks as a target for a good run this time around.

Steve Lewis did well finishing just one min behind me, he’s improving fast.

And Tracey finished first of the Southport girls winning her a team prize, she also tripped on a tent peg after the race and almost went flying!

The Video below is from the 2005 race when a young Mo Farah won with impressive style, great video check it out!


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

cheers for the blog comments rick. it was bloody freezing today. glad you enjoyed the sefton event and good luck at beacon park.

Ewen said...

Well done Rick! Great effort after slaving away at work and 2 hours sleep. Enjoyed the video... at least you would have run fast enough not to get lapped ;) Well done to Tracey. If she had a blog it'd rival Scott Brown's for comedy.

Rick said...

Ewen,
Yes I think a gold medal for getting out of bed!
But no points for my race performance, it felt like a tempo run, but I could go no faster!
i felt fresh today [Sunday] a sign that i'd not really pushed my limit in the race, still good training on a positive note :]
Marty; thanks