David Currie

706It was the Hampshire Cross-Country Champs today which, as in recent years, was held at Dibden. The temperature was in the low single figures and, as we drove down to the event, the trees had a good frosting on them. The timing of the senior races is always a bit awkward with Christine off at 12:50 and myself 50 minutes later. This meant I was feeding Emma her lunch whilst Christine was out running and trying not to eat too much of it myself!

Christine had a good run and the Southampton ladies picked up a bronze medal in the team competition. When I handed Emma over to Christine I then had 10 minutes to get changed and warm-up. I opted for wearing a Helly and gloves which seemed about right to me but there were plenty of mad fools in just a running vest and shorts. I started at a fairly fast pace for me (6 min/miles) given that the course was over 12.4km but I prefer to get dragged along and drop back through the ranks if necessary.

There was a bit of phlegm clearing going on as the sore throat that plagued me over the Christmas period has returned and it took the first of the three laps before a tight hamstring loosened up. As often seems to be the case, my upper legs felt pretty tired and it was all a bit of an effort. By the final lap, despite a good run-in, I was down to 6.22 min/mile and had a finishing time of around 45:03. It was a fairly respectable run but nothing to write home about (the winner was someone below 38 minutes). I’m just pleased to have been out running or cycling five days so far this week. Let’s hope I can keep that up for the rest of the year.

(I had the camera out although with Emma clinging to my leg much of the time I didn’t get many good shots. A few of the better ones are up on Flickr. With the aid of the “Export to Flickr” Lightroom plugin I also hope to do a better job of getting more photos up on Flickr this year.)

Hants XC Champs GPX

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Photography, Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.