A day at the seaside
On Sunday I ran the Weston AC Christmas Cracker 10km run.
The conditions were perfect: cool, bright and still - yes, no wind at Weston, the Southwest's prime kitebuggy beach, a miracle. It must have been all the Little Baby Jesuses or something: this was a fancy-dress event so the serious club runners were in a single bit of tinsel, and the serious charity runners were going as entire Nativity scenes (there were two!) or mobs of Wise Men and Sexy Santas. I donned some angel wings and a tinsel halo and hit the beach.
The plan was that![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ehutch and I would pace around for a 55:00 finish, leaving despaer up ahead to mount an assault on a serious time. The beach was a little harder-going than we'd like (but easier than at Burnham, man, everything is easier than Burnham - Ice Cold In Alex was easier than Burnham). After 7k of tougher-than-expected-for-so-flat running we split and I had a good old gurn to the finish before my hips seized up completely, then it was off to enjoy the finishers' mince pie and be surprised at how good I felt.
Time? I finished in 57:10, which is a PB for that distance by well over two minutes. (I'll let the others post-mortem their own runs) The pacing alarm on the Suunto worked a treat, though I'll have to calibrate it with a GPS-measured klick as it said I did 10.25km. Certainly it's easy to pick up the pace when the thing's beeping "beep-beep-beep, pick-it-up!". The 55:00 target was a tad optimistic given the lack of training ;) Apparently I was putting out an average 161BPM, so about 5-10 over my usual run - which was what I wanted to do and was the sustainable max I could manage. And the new shoes came right on the day, which eases my worry about having hurled a ton of cash at the wrong bling. Generally happy with my performance and confident that I can keep working at that distance for the Olympic.
Photos and official times when the club get them online...
The plan was that
ehutch and I would pace around for a 55:00 finish, leaving despaer up ahead to mount an assault on a serious time. The beach was a little harder-going than we'd like (but easier than at Burnham, man, everything is easier than Burnham - Ice Cold In Alex was easier than Burnham). After 7k of tougher-than-expected-for-so-flat running we split and I had a good old gurn to the finish before my hips seized up completely, then it was off to enjoy the finishers' mince pie and be surprised at how good I felt. Time? I finished in 57:10, which is a PB for that distance by well over two minutes. (I'll let the others post-mortem their own runs) The pacing alarm on the Suunto worked a treat, though I'll have to calibrate it with a GPS-measured klick as it said I did 10.25km. Certainly it's easy to pick up the pace when the thing's beeping "beep-beep-beep, pick-it-up!". The 55:00 target was a tad optimistic given the lack of training ;) Apparently I was putting out an average 161BPM, so about 5-10 over my usual run - which was what I wanted to do and was the sustainable max I could manage. And the new shoes came right on the day, which eases my worry about having hurled a ton of cash at the wrong bling. Generally happy with my performance and confident that I can keep working at that distance for the Olympic.
Photos and official times when the club get them online...
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(ClassicMan, for what it's worth, is an idea I keep bouncing around involving swimming the Hellespont and running a marathon into Marathon itself, with a connecting bike leg over some suitably mythic terrain.)
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I think Classic is an understatement. "Epic" might be better.
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Though it has highlighted the beautiful, self-contained bowl that is the Aegean. Maybe as an extreme holiday tour than as a race?
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Actually lets ride down Olympus at all. It would be simply cruel to deny participants the descent...