On Thursday night Christine, then Emma, then I, had been sick. Although Emma bounced back very quickly, Christine and I had spent Friday recovering and it was therefore with some trepidation that we set off for today’s Test Way Relay. Christine was running first leg for the Southampton Orienteering Club team, starting at Inkpen Beacon. As they had only two women in the team they didn’t qualify as a mixed team and hence she set off with around 15 men (the womens and mixed teams starting an hour earlier). It therefore wasn’t particularly surprising that she came in to the changeover in last place.
I was running for Southampton Athletic Club doing the same leg from Middleton to Wherwell that I had run last year. As with last time, I set off in first place in the mens race. As I slid along the first path I began to think I’d made the wrong choice wearing road shoes but as I hit the tarmac I realised that, not only was this a reasonable decision, I also wasn’t actually feeling too bad. I had set my Garmin up to race against myself from last year. It’s not a function that I use very often and, when I looked at it at about the half way mark, I thought I was around 100 metres behind where I had been last year. This seemed pretty good and I pushed myself a little harder after that. It was only when I had finished and was asked for my time, I realised that I’d actually taken over half a minute less than last year!
Apparently the SOC team finished in 6th place which is pretty respectable. I’ve no idea where my team finished although we were around 4 minutes in the lead when I handed over.
Dave,
next year you will have to run for the SOC team rather than the competition. Which should both slow down the competition and speed us up.
Also apparently it was the 25th running of the event and it was actually the SOC that started the event so it was good that we put in a team again this year after
a break of about 15 years.
cheers,
Neil
I’m glad to see that SAC did win this year although only by 8 minutes over Winchester rather than the 19 minutes from last year. Looks like I was caught on camera going through Forton.