JK 2013

So, after last years outing to Scotland, this years event was much easier to get to as it was in and around Reading in the south of England.

Day 1 was the sprint event held at the University of Reading campus where my course was a 1.9km straight line course around the building in the campus where (obviously) none of the direct routes were possible as they all went straight through buildings! Not the greatest run as I made some route choice errors (wrong way round buildings and managed to mislay the final control and lost a couple of minutes as I found my way again. Oops.

Day 2 was in the beautiful woods at Hambleden just north east of Henley. It was bitterly cold, but I loved the location and the 10km & 410m climb course. I made a silly error at one control, but was fairly consistent through the others not getting utterly lost (as I did last year).

Day 3 was in Cold Ash woods just north of Newbury and south of the M4. This was a must wetter area than day 2 and pretty boggy in places. Did not enjoy the 9.5km course nearly as much as yesterday and it took almost 10 minutes longer even with far less climb.

Day 4 was the relays in a slightly different part of Hambleden. Again, the weather was good and running the second leg in the company of Alan Honey (first) and Jeremy Tonge (third) we came a very respectable 27th of 57 teams competing in the senior mens competition.

Although the weekend was pretty cold, it was brilliant and I enjoyed every day. I came 71st overall out of 123 during the main two days.

http://www.thejk.org.uk/jk2013/

Bath Half Marathon 2013

For the seventh straight year, I ran the bath half marathon on 3rd March with my brother around the streets of Bath with thousands of other runners and the usual crowds of supporters. This year was a little different to last year though, with the temperature around 20 degrees lower.

Arriving in Bath to see my brothers family before the run, the outside temperature gauge read -1 degrees Celcius and I'm pretty sure the temperature did not come much above zero for the whole day. Given my decision to run again in my supergirl fancy dress outfit to embarrass my brother (as much as anything else), I at least had something to cover my arms, but my legs got pretty cold in the long wait at the start line for the gun to go off. My brother was feeling pretty confident this year about his training and so we went off at quite a pace and ended up doing the first few miles not far off 7m40s each. Despite a bit of a slow down in miles 9 and 10, we kept pretty much at this sort of pace throughout the race and it was brilliant to get my brother to a new PB of 1.43.29. I was finding it quite difficult to slow down in the last mile and despite high fiving most of the crowds in that last mile uphill I still ended up finishing 8 seconds ahead of him in 1.43.21.

The cold weather meant a decrease in the number of people cheering in the streets (compared to last year) but the fancy dress still meant that we got plenty of cheers for supergirl, superwoman, superman and superthingy as well as one cheer for batwoman ?!?

I've had a week to recover now and need to start thinking about my 10km ambitions for the year. I'll get posting soon.

Lack of direction

2013 is not looking as good as 2012 with my running. Since my last half marathon, training has been reasonably good, but I still do not feel the incentive I had to do well last year.7

Added to that, I pulled my quadriceps muscle on Friday evening whilst coaching the children at NSAA. So no running yesterday and today!

So, I need to get myself into a challenge again and working towards an objective. Bath half is a good start (although I'll be running with my brother again).

After that I need a decent 10km race to get my speed going. I think I'm going to start doing the parkruns more regularly and see how it goes!

Challenges for 2013

After some contemplation over my Christmas break about a successful and fun 2012 running half marathons, the time came to think about what to do in 2013. I almost felt lost over Christmas with a lack of focus in my running despite entering the usual Clevedon boxing day 4 mile run (a PB by my watch) and the Hangover 10km (almost a PB) near Weston Super Mare. After a year of always having the next race planned and a training plan in place to take me there, I feel directionless without some sort of plan for the year.

So, I have decided to renew my monthly race plan, but to replace the half marathon with the 10km, with the objective of going sub 40 minutes sometime during the year and perhaps to average sub 42 minutes. Given that my January 1st race was completed in 41m25s, the average may not be too tricky,  but given that races are not always flat and fast, I must assume that some will be much slower than the 40 minute goal.

There are plenty of 10km races locally during the year, so  need to pick some and go with it. I have previously raced the Frenchay 10km in April and the towpath series in Bristol from June to August.

I also have grown to enjoy blogging on this site, so despite the fact that 2012 has gone, I will continue to post my contemplation here.

Current thoughts on races are as follows:

January - Hangover 10km - 41m25s
February - Bath Skyline 10km
March - Hemington 10k ?
April - Frenchay 10km
May - GWR Towpath
June - GWR Towpath
July - GWR Towpath
August - GWR Towpath
September - ?
October - ?
November - Bath Skyline ?
December - Wyvern Christmas Cracker

This will be the minimum number as I think I will probably add some other local races in as well as tempo runs.

Happy new year!