10K for the RSPCA by warriorgrrl

Today I ran the inaugural BUPA London 10,000 road race. At 10km it's the furthest I've ever run and I'm pleased to announce I ran it all without stopping and came in two minutes under my target time of an hour and ten minutes. It was all quite enjoyable really, despite the torrential rain that soaked through all my clothes before I even got to the start line, and I'm definitely interested in doing a longer race later in the year.

I treated myself to a lovely hot bath and some dry socks when I got home and have been munching through various carb heavy snacks all afternoon to keep my strength up. What a great excuse to eat tortilla chips and chocolate!

I video blogged the whole thing, as is my wont:



I thought you might be interested to know what music accompanied me round the city streets - I really don't think I could have done it without the following top tunes:

1. Supervixen - Garbage
2. Wind It Up - Gwen Stefani
3. I'm A Slut - bis
4. Channels - Popular Workshop
5. Date With The Night - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
6. Get Off - Dandy Warhols
7. Vorvolaka - Die So Fluid
8. Little Sister - Queens of the Stone Age
9. Hot Ride - The Prodigy
10. Alala - CSS
11. Alice Practice - Crystal Castles
12. Icky Thump - The White Stripes
13. It's Getting Boring By The Sea - Blood Red Shoes
14. Semi-Mental - Biffy Clyro
15. Sour Cherry - The Kills
16. Hysteria - Muse
17. My Love Is Pink - Sugababes
18. Vulcan - Snake River Conspiracy
19. Succexy - Metric
20. The Hand That Feeds - Nine Inch Nails


I wanted to wear my lovely war paint but it's water soluble, so I just had to be content with having mascara streaming down my (very smug) face instead. Pretty!



Thank you to everyone who sponsored me to do this, I raised over £300 in the end and couldn't have done it without Annie Mole, delboydare, Denrael, Kai Chan Vong, Kyle MacRae, Andrew, Hinchcliffe, Mum & Dad, Tez, kymmie, Sevitz, Shena & James, Lizzie, Jess McCabe, Matt Grounds, Lorraine Burlingham, Tess & Kev, Walid, Christine Greathead, Michael Lyons, Rob Drayton, James Whatley, Kate Burgess, Rachel Willis-Bartlett, Tom Bosworth, Ed, brooner, Julia and Gran. Thanks everyone!!!

If you've found me through this realbuzz blog please add my regular blog to your RSS readers or bookmark list. I won't be posting on here any more but I regularly update that one:

http://www.shemakeswar.com/blog

It's come around so quickly and I'm getting quite excited now. I played a tiring gig last night so have been taking it relatively easy today, trying tor est my aching limbs and brain ready for the morning's exertions. Fingers crossed the rain stops for us - just an hour and a half of clear skies would do!

Good luck to everyone taking part and big thanks to my friends for being so generous - total sponsorship at the moment is £295.21 with an additional £69.16 coming from Gift Aid.

Benji got neutered last Wednesday and we went to visit my family in Suffolk on Thursday so that all put paid to any training I had planned. Sunday was spent filming a very cool bloggers event and crashing with exhaustion the moment I got home but I dragged myself out for 40 minutes this afternoon and am feeling much better for it.

I foolishly didn't leave quite enough time between eating a pretty big lunch and setting off on my run and ended up having to walk for about 5 minutes halfway through to get rid of a stitch. I haven't stopped to walk during a run since I started in May 2007, so that's disappointing. Still, better to get these things out of the way before the big day, I suppose.

I'm going to have to fit at least two more runs in, should I make it three? I was thinking of aiming for 7.5 - 8km on Wednesday morning then another 30 or 40 minute run on Friday or Saturday with a rest day on Sunday. Or I could do 40 minutes on Friday and a faster 20 minutes on Saturday. Does anyone have advice?

16 days to go and I'm finally feeling better. It's such a relief to finally be out and running again after 11 days of no training whatsoever, most spent coughing and spluttering and worrying about how on earth I was going to run 10K!

My new plan has me running four times next week and three the next, increasing times up to 50 minutes only and doing plenty of yoga on inbetween days to keep supple. I'd like to finish the race in an hour or so but will have to speed up a bit from my usual 1.5km per 10 minutes average to achieve that. My priority is running it all in one go, so as long as I do that I'll be happy.

Sponsorship is up to £120 now - hurrah! I'll be emailing everyone I've ever met in the next few days to try and get some more pennies in the pot, you can sponsor me on my Just Giving page here. Thanks for the support :)