"I'm raaacing in the rain..."

Ah, and a week has passed! It's not that there was nothing physical involved in Scotland; Lugging half a tonne of camping gear around the rail network will certainly give you a thorough workout, but it's not quite the same as the familiar ache that you get from stretching your legs for a few miles. So, how have I gotten back into the swing of things after a weeks break?

Well, the club run on Tuesday continued the trend of my workouts being chased by weather akin to the stuff that curses Glastonbury on a yearly basis; As soon as I've been setting out with shorts on the clouds have taken it upon themselves to provide me with nice refreshment halfway in to my runs, which has been very considerate of them. On one hand though, it does provide added incentive to charge around the course quicker when the lure of a hot shower is a strong one, but you do run into problems when you're leaping hurdles over puddles of Vicar of Dibley-esque proportions, most causing your shoes to get soaked and rub and your feet, well, disintegrate, which is never helpful. We all splashed through puddles for a good 5.5 miles though, which was probably enough considering the circumstances.

To make up for the slight shortfall in distance (And the fact that my car's decided to contract swine flu and splutter constantly) I ran to the meeting point with the club tonight, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but as my legs are happily reminding me at the moment, might have been pushing it a little. The run there added another 2.8 miles onto tonight's circuit, bringing the total distance upto about 10 miles which was put away in about 1.20 which feels good, although whether I can keep that up without the club's couple of rest-stops is another matter completely. It was good to do some decent distance again though, having forgotten what it felt like from not doing anything more than a 10k since the Marathon, and it was a good excuse to burn off some festival calories in the evening sun.

Speaking of 10ks though, I seem to have accidentally landed into doing another one, as you do. The Jane Tomlinson 10k in York is this Sunday, and one of our club runners at the Selby Striders has had to drop out, leaving a spare number and timing chip floating in the ether, meaning I'll be getting up at silly-o-clock for the 9am start, tanking around with about 10,000 other people doing exactly the same thing. Well, what else are you meant to be doing at that time on a Sunday morning?

Anyway, I'll report back in after the race with tales of glory/woe/hilarity and the obligatory running graphs. If you see a guy in a red Selby Striders shirt and a beard, heckling is mandatory and encouraged.

Good running!

Matt

Through the wind and the rain...

So, I've returned just about alive from another 10k, this being in the little village of Stillington in the great vast nowhere north of York. It's a course which people would generally describe as 'rolling', which roughly translated means 'All the gradients are under 10%, but only just'. So, what have we learned from this race?

• Reverse handicaps are great in theory, but they mean that when you try to sprint dramaticallyat the end, you have to play chicanes to get around the veritable moshpit of people running in front of you.



• This is also tricky when there's a 90 degree bend to negotiate to get over the finishing line, at least if you don't fancy going base-over-apex in loose gravel.



• The staggered start also means waiting around at the beginning for some time, and when you're due to be called up, the heady combination of nervous tension, adrenaline and pre-race caffiene will cause you to shoot off into the sunset at a pace that only Wanjiru and colleagues can sustain.



• Wearing sunglasses in the rain will cause you to go almost completely blind, and make you rely on the brightly-coloured running vests out front to keep you on course.

Yup, par to course, last night the heavens opened halfway into the race, causing the fields and woods of Yorkshire to resemble monsoon season. Refreshing, perhaps, but it makes you concentrate when hurtling at breakneck speeds down the last hill to the finish line. All in all though, it was a fun course to do, and with a respectable 47:40ish time (The race wasn't measured accurately), I came close to a PB on a course which wasn't as flat as the plains, which I can certainly cope with. Oh, and because they're shiny, here's the speed/distance graph from last night. If only I could run the entire thing at 4:50 eh?

Anyway, short break from running as I go to visit bonnie Scotland for a few days, but I will be back with more news and race reviews next week!



Good running!



Matt

The Starting Line

Welcome to my first post in the latest extension of my small hobby/mild obsession of running, that is Fartleking About! To get the introductions out of the way, my name's Matt and I'm a pseudo-healthnut of 23 years of age and hailing from North Yorkshire, where all the fields be. I've been running for almost a year and a half now, so I've gotten to the point where I'm feeling brave enough to acquire all the shiny gadgets and try some of the more 'interesting' training flavours that are out there, this blog feeling a natural extension of all this. I'm hoping that it'll serve as a handy tool for not only giving some vague structure to the amorphous mass that is my running schedule, but some insight into why I get up at 7am to run through horizontal rain, and why I will inevitably found in a ditch 10 miles from nowhere with naught on me but a cheefully-coloured running vest, a timing chip and a windswept grin plastered across my face.

So, before I tell any new dramatic training tails, here's a few handy facts and figures:

• I'm 6'3"-ish with about 14st strapped to my frame, so I'm not a gentle runner by any means.
• I generally run around 20 miles a week, with two 7-ish mile runs with the Selby Striders, the local running club, plus a 5k race with the Parkrun team on a weekend, with the odd run inbetween.
• Outside of training, I've ran a total of 8 5k races, 4 10ks and 1 London Marathon
• Since the London Marathon, I've run 148 miles roughly, as counted whenever I can remember to up the tally.
• I run with a Garmin Forerunner 205 training watch and a pair of Nike Zoom Structured Triax 12 running trainers, after I wore my last pair of Asics into oblivion.

My current PBs are:

• 5k - 22:44
• 10k - 47:38
• Marathon - 5:29:13

So, what am I hoping to achieve in the future? I've got the last race of the York Road Race League tomorrow night, which'll be a 10k, and fun and unusual enough, it's a reverse handicap race, so the slowest from the previous 4-5 races go first, then the next, all the way back to the quickest, which should result in a dramatic finish as everyone scrums across the line in one go in a bid to get the shiny winner's t-shirt, although I have these ominous visions of fences at a Grand National, when one horse goes down in the front and everyone else trips up over them in the ensuing panic. Should be interesting at least, and the best chance I'll have at crossing the line first for a while at least.

After that's all done with, I've got a couple of goals on the horizon. I'd really love to get my 5k time under 20 minutes, which seems as though it should be possible with my ridiculously long stride, and then work on slowly knocking down the time from there, and then as the afternoons get a bit cooler and long runs become a bit more acceptable, I'm going to have a stab at a half-marathon to see how well I can cope with distance at a reasonable speed, opposed to my 10-min mile plodding for a full one, and if anyone can recommend a good one to break me in gently, or one which will snap me in two but at least have pretty views, the hints would be more than appreciated.

Anyway, I think this enough waffling and PB ego-stroking for one night, so I'll be back later when I have the full race report from the Stillington 10k tomorrow. If you're around, kind words of support for the beardy git in the Striders running vest will not go amiss.

Good running!

Matt