Run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me i'm the gingerhaired man! by Paulo23

My preparation for this race could hardly have been worse, having hardly exercised for two weeks partly because of injury but i'd recovered enough to go swimming and play tennis for 2 hours each the day before the race. That night i also ditched my normal pre-race day pasta for kebab and chips.

It was also unfortunate that I didn't sleep that well that night as I had to get up so very early in order to get to the race. I woke up at 5am to get to the train station for 6o'clock before an hour on the train and a further half hour walk to get to Battersea park!

I'd been time keeping almost obsessively to meet this schedule, but i hadn't counted on the start being so far away from the registration table. I'd raced once before in Battersea Park and the route was set out differently which i hadn't expected. By the time I reached the start the race had already started!

I'd missed the start by 2 minutes, this had never happened to me before and I couldn't believe it. I do put this partly down to the organisation of the event, shouldn't there have been a call for the runners to the start, wouldn't they wait for all the runners to arrive, i certainly wasn't the only one to miss the start.

For a while I made a mad dash to make up some time but i quickly realised that was a pointless enterprise. For a long time I was overtaking large numbers of runners, the slower ones at the back and making my way forward through the field.

I was overtaking pretty much the whole race but the rate I passed them slowed as I settled into my own race. However in my panic at the start I had neglected to start my stopwatch so I didn't really know too well how i was running.

The other thing i had to work out was the course, the route wasn't hard to figure as it was very circular, but I worked out soon from the distance markers that the number of laps was more than I had thought.

I was a little bit hard to keep high motivation to run as best as I can knowing that I wasn't really in the race, and my poor preparation had already made me doubt my chances of a good performance. But overall was I got settled it was an enjoyable run through the park.

I finished in a time of 44.45, which taking into consideration my delayed start would have been 42.45ish which is respectable by my standards, but also encouraging to think that with better preparation and time time-keeping i could've done even better.