It’s been a busy weekend with Duncan off at a party yesterday and then setting out our stall at the school car boot sale (a profitable couple of hours but we still came back with far more stuff than I’d hope to have!). Today it was the Hursley 10K and it was my turn to run this year. As an added incentive, this year I was running with #8 which, I was told, was based on the estimated time that I had submitted. What I also knew was that #1 had beaten me by some 4 minutes two years ago so I wasn’t trying to keep up from the start!
Things went well for the first half when I was in a pack of five behind the leading two runners. Unfortunately I started to fade after that (blood doning last Wednesday?) and also started to wretch around the 7km marker (something that’s affected me before in 10k races so there’s probably something wrong with my pre-race prep). I was therefore glad to hit the open at the end with no-one on my tail and could coast to finish in 7th place. Depending on how you look at things, either I was either 4 seconds slower that two years ago (gun time of 38:49) or one second faster (chip time of 38:45).
Both Emma and Duncan were entered in the children’s races. Duncan was off first in the KS1 race and declared that he wanted to run on his own. This was probably a mistake as he got his first stitch on the way round which was obviously paining him as he came in to the finish. Emma had a longer loop in the KS2 race and, although she claimed not to have enjoyed herself very much, put on a respectable show. She seems to have become very materialistic of late and was very put out at ‘just’ getting a buff, bag, banana and water bottle!
We then had to race off as Emma was meant to be singing with the Brownies at the local fun day (she’d already missed singing with the school). We arrived just in time for her to enter the arena having no idea what she was meant to be singing! She needn’t have worried though as it was virtually impossible to hear them over the band playing at the other end of the rec. Thankfully there were long queues at most of the attractions to disuade Emma but she eventually decided that she would like to have a go on the pony rides. By this time I needed to get home to have a cup of tea and a sit down!