Great Nosh Footrace

Yesterday's race: 15km trail run, 2 and a quarter hours

As you might guess with my lack of posting, I am finding it really difficult to make myself get out and run since my half. I am trying to enthuse myself with a focus on speed training, thinking it is quite different to what I had done before, but it hasn't really been working. I posted about this on Cool Running, and got some good suggestions. The best ones were to find people to run with, and to try some trail running - either the Great Nosh Footrace (15km) on Sunday, or Woodford to Glenbrook ( a 24km run) in a couple of weeks. I posted my question about my motivation on Saturday, so when I saw the suggestion to try the Nosh run, I figured why not? I thought 15km would be relatively easy compared to my half. Boy was that wrong! The run took me only 10 minutes less than my half marathon!

I ran for about the first 3 or 4 kms with Emjay and TigerAngel. To be honest I was surprised I kept up with them for so long... the few times I had been to runclub earlier in the year they were always miles ahead of me. Anyway, I started to drop back a bit further, then a bit further... The view in the first parts of the race were just spectacular - I only wish I didn't have to concentrate on the ground in front so hard - I missed most of the sights! Most of the middle 5km was run pretty much on my own, playing leap frog with a couple of other runners. I was pretty disappointed that I had to do some walking in the middle parts - I could feel that I didn't have enough km's in my legs recently, but I think the very undulating and rough terrain took more energy than I realised! There were certainly some hands and knees parts over boulders and up some very steep inclines, and there was one boulder I'm sure I wouldn't have made it up without a friendly runner giving me a hand.

The last 5km or so I started to chat to one of the runners I had been playing leap frog with in the middle section - it turned out to be Slow Maniac's girlfriend. She was exactly my pace, and running with someone else my pace kept me honest - there are times I probably would have let myself walk but I made myself keep up with her! I haven't really had the experience of running in a race with someone else - normally I'm so far in the back I race mostly on my own. The last 5km went much more quickly and were quite enjoyable with the company.

About a km before the end another lady who was running just in front of us took quite a fall and really knocked the wind out of her sails. We stayed with her for 5mins or so as she recovered - at this point my time was so slow that I wasn't really worried about that aspect at all! I did feel bad for my parents though, who had driven to the finish line so they could give me a lift back to the start where my car was - I think they were expecting me to be quicker (so was I) and they ended up waiting around for ages.

All in all, I enjoyed the trail running aspect of things, but boy it was a hard run. I've never had to do so much walking in a run for a long time. There were still a few kms in there were I wondered why I was doing it, but hopefully my motivation improves from here.