Being a stickler for tradition, I normally like to spend the first 12 hours of the new year either drunk or asleep. But this year, at 11 o’clock on New Year’s Day morning, I found myself lining up in Hyde Park for the annual 10K race.
I’m going to start writing a document called Things To Remember On Race Day. Among those items will be:
- Keep breakfast to a minimum
- No milk or dairy products
- Never underestimate a race
I was up at 7:30, feeling hungry. Ignoring the residual wisdom scraped from the bones of previous disasters, I was soon tucking into a large bowl of cereal, two hot cross buns, a glass of grapefruit juice and a mug of milky coffee. Result? The sensation of being in an advanced stage of pregnancy. This disagreeable feeling was still with me three hours later, as I mooched round the start line in Hyde Park. I knew then that it was going to be tough.
To make things worse, I was sleepy. There are many benefits from living between two pubs. But one of the downsides, I’ve discovered, comes on New Years Eve.
We didn’t go out, and once we’d seen the New Year in it was time for me to get some sleep. But my bedtime coincided with the point where the revellers at the pub next door decided to spill into the street for a burst of Auld Lang Syne and much snogging and hand-shaking. Then came the fireworks, with each rocket accompanied by enthusiastic cheering. When that was all over, it was the turn of the inhabitants of the other pub, across the road, to emerge and express themselves.
Sometime around three o’clock, the noise was gone, and I could sleep.
It seems to me that the longer the distance, the more preparation you have to do. For marathons, a great collection of medicines and treatments and dressings and equipment and emergency aids must be listed and amassed and worried about. Half marathons less so, and 10Ks? Pshaww! Or perhaps it’s just that I’m gathering more experience of these events, and getting less intimidated.
By 8:30 I was aquaplaning along the M4. The sky was a dark, grainy grey, the rain tumultuous and bullying. Deeply unpromising.
Early on a bank holiday, particularly this one, the drive through London is a dream. Only ten or fifteen minutes to get from Hammersmith to Hyde Park, where I parked at the west end of the Serpentine.
The rain had stopped, and it was getting brighter. With still over an hour to kick off, I was heartened to see plenty of other track-suited goody-goodies like me around the place. There is always this fear that no one will turn up except me and a handful of elite runners.
Hyde Park is a great place for an event like this, on a day like this. It’s a wonderful park; more spacious and unspoilt than you could think possible in this city. Let the critics disparage London and Londoners, but I’ve become increasingly defensive about the place. Here was Exhibit A.
I got down to the bandstand about half an hour before the start. The atmosphere was jovial and strangely civilised. Something to do with the date; something to do with the venue.
According to the results there were only 429 finishers, though I’m sure there were supposed to be more entrants than that. The rain and the date probably accounted for a number of no-shows from the ranks of the lily-livered and the pickled-livered.
After a few hundred yards, I knew for sure that this was going to be quite difficult for me. I’d weighed in at 215 pounds, which is 20 pounds heavier than I was in Chicago, just 10 or 11 weeks ago. It makes a significant difference. I just felt heavy and out of condition, not helped by too much breakfast and too little sleep.
The rain had completely covered some of the paths, giving the runners the choice of sploshing through ten yard stretches of ankle-deep water, or slithering through the same length of liquid mud alongside. I chose the mud. Running for any distance with sodden feet can result in blisters — and I never want to experience my pre-London Marathon blister hell again.
It wasn’t long before I’d taken up my favourite position, a few places ahead of the back marker. I find this a good place from which to plan my race strategy.
My Spring target is to do a 10K in under an hour. I did think I might even have a chance of doing it yesterday. I needed to run a kilometre every 6 minutes, but I never really looked like doing this, and my splits ended up as:
06:08; 06:19; 06:26; 06:38; 06:39; 06:57; 06:40; 06:56; 06:29; 06:16;
I crossed the finishing line in 404th place, out of 429.
Not a great run, but at least it gives me something to beat next time. And I guess that a New Years Day run is more symbolic than anything.
