What is it about race day mornings that get you and the bathroom so well acquainted?

Well, enough of that already…

Did we forget to mention it was race weekend? If you saw last week’s post then you’ll have seen a little summary of how this weekend came about and the journey so far.

It feels like it came around so very quickly. It seems it was only yesterday that it was mid-August and the running shoes were laced up for the first time in a while. A very quick and easy run and that was it.

Three months of consistency getting the running back as we slide into the autumn and winter months.

The weekend just gone was the celebration of that first block of training. The first time I’ve ever really managed to get some consistency. A lot of that has to be down to TrainAsOne and how it’s adapted to my running.

It’s been a little frosty recently and there was rain on the cards so the potential for poor weather was high. Luckily that wasn’t the case. Whilst a touch breezy on the shoreline of the lake the sun made it feel much nicer.

Registration was super easy as with last time. CityTrail have got it down.

Getting ready for the race, after a little warm up to get, well, warm and I found myself thinking I should be towards the back of the second group. That’s where I imagined I’d be, looking around at the runners there.

I really needn’t of worried about positioning and reflecting back, spoiler, I should’ve been more confident and got myself to the front.

The result of that was that I got to do a lot of overtaking, which whilst good for the ego, is bad for the time on a cross country run with single track.

It’s trickier than you might think for a run with not a huge amount of elevation. There’s soft sand, roots and lots of leaves covering it all up. Oh, and that long drag up in the third km really takes it out of you.

Coming into the finishing chute and I wasn’t quite sure how I’d done.

Results:

Chip time: 25:03
Open: 139/255
Age Group: 55/75

That made it a course PB by 2:05 from the last time I ran it a few years back. That time was one second slower than TrainAsOne predicted which is incredibly impressive.

Looking forward to the next 5 weeks of training before the next one. The real goal is to get to the March edition with a full winter of consistency under my race number.

What kind of improvements might we see?