Sunday dawned sunny and bright, and I had just enough time to blindly swallow down some porridge before heading off to meet my HBAC team mates at 7.15am.  On a Sunday.  Ought to be outlawed.  On the upside, at least a 9am race start gets it all out of the way nice and early, so you can get on with proper Sunday business, such as chilling out or having a nice nap.

So off to Elmbridge we went - this race is in our road race league and we had a team of 5 of us heading up there, so much chatter in the car on the way up, which is always nice.

Arrived, picked up our race numbers and chips and before we knew it, we were off!

I was a little uncertain on the wisdom of doing a 10k race so soon after a mammoth 100k odyssey, but with only 8 weeks left to train until Berlin, I figured I had better get the trainers on and give it the good old British try.  So I decided to take it easy and just see how I got on.  And there's no denying that it was not an easy race for me.  The course is very flat - along the road till about the 5k mark and then back along the tow path.  But despite this I was really struggling, with nothing to speak of in my legs, and nothing but the thoughts in my head, thanks to an illtimed i-pod freeze at the start.

At about 8k I decided that my hips were more than achey enough to warrant a little walk break - but unfortunately I soon discovered that it was actually more painful on the hips to walk (clue - they were very painful on Trailwalker, which might have given me a hint!) so I started running again.

On the final corner before the finish, there was an old chap marshalling.  As I ran towards him he shouted "Go on love, show them how the British fought like tigers".  I have no idea what that even means, but it did make me put on a little spurt of speed and enabled me to overtake someone right at the finish.  Yaaaay!  My time ended up being 1:01:55, so certainly not at my quickest, but I'm more than happy with the time - am happy just to get round the course.

With the road race season now nearly over (only one event left in the league calendar - where did it go?!) it's now time to start thinking about cross country.  As ladies team captain, I'm already encouraging all HBAC members to get their trail shoes out - personally I can't wait to get my mud on!  Trying to rein in enthusiasm a little as still have much road training to do for Berlin.  However I find it quite ironic that our club training programme is forced to hit the streets the moment CC season starts, as it's too dark to run off road!  So in actual fact, I'll be getting plenty of pavement pounding done.

Hope everyone is well x

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