That went quite well.
I’m sitting, or rather semi-reclined, on the sofa having watched the latest episode of Bakeoff with my lunch and I’m trying to analyse my race this morning.
It was the Wirral 10k (although, according to mine and Lucy’s tracking it was a little bit further than 10k) and the weather for a there-and-back along the sea front was surprisingly perfect. Warm enough for just a vest (and shorts and undergarments of course) and very little wind to speak of.
I’m two weeks into my experiment with being coached so this race can act as a decent enough baseline. It also helps that for the past two nights I’ve slept, relatively, very well. My right leg issues that I’d charged Nigel with sorting for me are manifestly becoming less of an issue. My sleepy inactive muscles have been prodded around and woken up and I’m a little less wonky than I was before I began that physio.
All things considered then, I had absolutely no excuses.
Anne dropped me off at the starting line where the old men played with their toy boats. Only one was on the water when I got there and whoever was piloting it could not take a corner to save his life as it bashed the wall on the about turn with gusto. Quite a few of the Pensby crew were spotted but I didn’t take my phone out to snap them. I dropped my jacket off with Rob in his conveniently parked car and I did a warmup mile with Iain, our resident Thursday Intervals coach – t was probably his idea of a gentle trot while I was at times galloping. Then, following the loo queue, I was meant to do some drills but I spotted an old workmate and had a nice catchup with him instead.
The gallop must have done me good as I began quite briskly in the actual race, albeit in a weaving manner as I started too far back. There are normally little signs in the waiting column for the different expected times, but I couldn’t see any of those. I would have stood by the one-hour mark as I felt like I should be able to hit that goal. For a while Lucy and I were walking along to the start together, but then she had to retie her laces and dropped back. So how she managed to be ahead of me in the first kilometre I don’t know, unless it was a sneaky ninja manoeuvre for me not to cramp her style.
All in all, the Wirral 10K is flat aside from two or three bumps. It has a very weird START and END where you have to go out to come back which is a bit psychologically off putting at the end. But I had done this race last year with a mate, so I was ready for that. Last year had felt like a stroll because I stayed with my friend most of the way, even though it was only a little over two minutes of where I wanted to be this year (1:02:13).
Trying to peel off those two minutes felt like hard work today, but I wanted to have a steady, evenly paced run and not to panic. It’s after the first few hundred metres, when your lungs catch up with what your legs are doing, that the panic may start to set in. You have to work out if you have set off too fast or if that hard breathing can be maintained for the next hour. I didn’t feel the panic too much until I saw the 2K sign which was quite a way after my watch had pinged a second six-minute kilometre reading. At this rate I was pacing for outside of the hour and I was already finding the breathing a tad hard.
I had no choice but to at least try and maintain the speed that I was going at. There was at least no weaving required aside from trying to career round the odd person who stopped suddenly. At around three kilometres out I saw fellow Pensby Runners Ben Taylor going in the opposite direction just leading the other racers. He finished in 32:20, a good twenty-nine seconds in front of the second place. He finished the race just after I had made the turn for the return 5K which is slightly awe-inspiring for me.
It was at this turn that I suddenly noticed Lucy ahead of me. We have been spurring each other on this year because we both have wanted to reduce our half marathon times down. Neither of us has hit our goals of two hours yet but she has got much closer than me. For the shorter races, we have been quite well matched. Sometimes she has beaten me and sometimes I beat her. Today, in the second half of the race I could feel that I could slowly reel her in. I think I might have been more successful with my bite than the fishermen who had their rods over the edge of the promenade when the tide seemed to be way out, so unless there was some hidden puddle beneath us, I’m not quite sure what they were up to.
The potential dilemma now was to work out when to speed up given that my breathing was already pretty much on the edge. I was secretly pleased that this dilemma was here at all because often I’m on the downward slip in the second half. It was not going to be a significant speed up, it was more a case of wringing myself out, making sure I had used up all my energy. The difference in speed might be negligible as I could just be trying to work harder at keeping my pace, but my watch had a few more sub-6 kilometres in this half, so I hoped that would be enough to get under the hour.
There wasn’t much to squeeze out. I got the smallest of negative splits but at least it was a negative split: First 5K (29:58), Second 5K (29:29) giving a total of 59:27. Given that my current goal is getting a sub 27 minutes in the parkrun, I’ve still got a way to go but I think I got the best out of myself today, I didn’t give in to the panic and I rode that fine line between comfortable and too hard all the way.
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