|
RE: April Powers
Race Report: 2016 Lindfield 10km Fun Run
I moved alongside the tallish middle-aged guy in the yellow shirt - it's a little over half way through the race and clearly he was suffering as much as I was. I cracked the usual joke we’ve all heard countless times before but which yet remains an acceptable ice breaker:
“When do we get to the fun part?” I asked, trying to sound less out of breath than I actually was.
“Well I sure don’t know” he said in an alarming accent which sounded American but which was almost instantly revealed as being Canadian;
“I just moved here from Toronto. This is my first race in Sydney.”
“Well my friend, welcome, but you’ve managed to pick the hilliest, nastiest, most brutal 10k fun run in Sydney. The person who named this a fun run is either a first class masochist or hasn’t actually ever run the thing!” A couple of other runners nearby grunted their agreement. It only occurred to me later that this was probably an unfairly callous thing to say to the guy in his first Australian race, but hey, it was the truth!
Seemingly not offended (or just too tired to show it), we chatted for a while, and he told me how he ran a “few” London marathons back in the ‘90s, but that these days he was limited to shorter runs. It was a nice bit of banter and took our minds off the task at hand for a while, but he soon fell off the pace and I had to get back to once again dealing with the reality of the situation.
The reality was that this was my first race in very nearly a year, so I had little real indication of how well I might run, despite this being the fourth year in which I had completed the event. I had no illusions about a PB, that much was clearly out of the question. I had hoped for a time around 60 minutes, but realistically knew I would be happy with anything under 65. This is after all, a race with some nasty hills and quick times are very much not the order of the day.
Rain had been forecast, but as I milled around earlier with the others near the starting line, it was warm and muggy with rain clouds in the distance along the coast but which were unlikely to move inland. It was a good crowd that turned out, and once again the Can Too cancer research fund-raising runners constituted an enormous part of the crowd, all resplendent in their orange running tops. Many of them were clearly taking this very seriously, doing warm up laps and drills in the final few minutes before the start. I decided against warming up as I was starting right at the back of the field, so the start would be slow enough to constitute a warm up in my reckoning.
Once under way it became clear just how warm the weather was. Whilst probably only around 20 degrees Celsius or so, the humidity had returned making it quite unpleasant, especially when the sun shone. Almost immediately I saw the first race victim, a young woman who it seems had taken a tumble over the kerb and was distraught and clearly not about to get and run any further. Later in the race though I would pass a rather more serious case, with a man lying under a space blanket and being attended to by two emergency services people, one of whom was urgently enquiring on the two way radio as to how soon the ambulance would arrive. I see this sort of thing too often in races, but one doesn't generally expect it in these shorter "fun" events.
My own race went pretty well. I tackled the hills, certainly not with ease, but arriving at the tops of them without too much distress. A cool breeze which sprang up as I hit the 7km mark made the last part of the race much more pleasant, and I crossed the line stopping my watch at 60:09, and I am pretty pleased with that, although it is far off my PB for this event. Depending on which way you look at it, it was either my third-fastest time for this race or my second-slowest. It depends, I think, how far through the bottle of red you are when contemplating it. For now, I’m taking it as a positive result given my stop-start last twelve months of running. If I can maintain a similar pace on the flat in Canberra next week for the half marathon, I might yet post a reasonable time there too.
For now, it’s another race bib on the man cave wall, and finally I can break my three days of abstinence and enjoy a bottle of red wine with dinner tonight.
Next up: the Canberra half marathon, seven days hence.
|
April Powers
