Although the pom poms for this run are out on the Marathon forum, my report really belongs in here. All those amazing VLM runners deserve the space for their efforts over the next 24 hours.
I entered this run what feels like ages back and forgot all about it. I had actually planned to do my October HM tomorrow and then suddenly remembered this! Maybe it was just as well in the end as events have conspired to have made an HM pretty much impossible.
My intention was to make it a good one as normally in a race I can go sub 60 minutes, but alas this was not to be. I've been nursing a horrible cold that I couldn't rest - eldest kitten had to be organised and taken to university last weekend, a particularly stressful life event in itself but taking him to a COVID hotspot constantly talked about in the press & radio wasn't my idea of fun! Anyway, he's settled in now, all safe and secure and thankfully my cold eased off enough to let me run today, yay!!!
The weather was actually ideal, chilly and damp but not so bad that it was difficult to choose suitable clothing. The course Katnap and I were going to take had to be changed as there were roadworks which we'd have had to go past twice, but that's ok - I like this route, it's one we were doing regularly over the summer.
Poor old Katnap is about 5 days into this cold and I'm amazed he came along, he should have stayed in bed really. At least for once I didn't feel like I was slowing him down. My legs felt much better than they did yesterday when I'd done a tester run, where they just didn't seem to have the oxygen getting to them and they felt like lead - I think Katnap had that problem today. Once the first couple of k were out of the way they thankfully felt ok but Katnap struggled for most of the journey.
The roads were busy and the tyres shooshed throughthe puddles but amazingly we didn't get splashed. The distractions of the cars were, however, very welcome, particularly as we got to the hillier parts of the route. Katnap really felt it but he kept going, somehow!
I'm afraid my time didn't do England proud, 1:06:28 . However, it was much better than I expected when I woke up this morning worrying whether I should do it at all. At the moment of writing the times haven't been uploaded to the Leaderboard but I hope I'm somewhere in the top 75 eventually. A bit disappointing but a run is a run is a run, and it's my first official bling of the year so I'll take that! It's only taken 10 months!!
HM next weekend π€π€π€!
Happy running everybody! Hope Storm Alex doesn't throw too much at you this weekend.
πQualified for Vitality World Cup
