After a week of very easy slow running, with no session faster than 5 minutes/km, to try to overcome the recent lethargy, it was back to racing yesterday evening at the final race in the Harrogate League series. I'd had strong warnings from Coach Pete to take it very easy in this race, considering that I'm racing in the British Masters 5000m on Sunday.......he said that it would be better to give this race a miss altogether. However, I only needed to score a few points to secure the M55 prize for the series and we needed some team points as well.
I had run this same course 2 years ago, it's all on the roads, which is an improvement from most of the HL races this year. The first half of the race was uphill, then a turnaround with descent to the finish. I set off at a very steady pace comfortably behind a few runners who I normally run with.
For the first half of the race I felt as though I wanted to accelerate, but had Pete's warnings in my mind, so I continued at what seemed like a very easy pace for a race (averaging just over 4 minutes per km on the uphill half). At halfway I'd just managed to catch up to my regular track partner Mark I so we ran together for the start of the return leg. After a kilometre or so Mark decided that he'd try to catch another clubmate Mark M-W who was about 25 metres ahead of us, so he suddenly speeded up. I decided to not go with Mark's injection of pace, but to carry on at about the same speed.
As we got nearer to the finish I was still feeling very fresh & relaxed, quite unusual for me at this stage of a race, so I picked up the pace (with only about 1km to go I figured that I wouldn't do too much damage for Sunday). I managed to overtake both Marks as well as 3 or 4 other runners. My finishing time was 31:01 for just over 8k, which was 2 1/2 minutes quicker than I did on this course 2 years ago. I finished in 24th place with hopefully sufficient points for the individual age group series win & team wins in the vets team & super vets.
Looking at my Garmin stats after the race I averaged 3:52 minutes per km, which is nothing special, although I ran the last km in 3:05....probably the fastest km that I've ever run! I now have a couple of days to recover before my debut track race on Sunday.
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