It's been a long time since I ran a race on the track so I drove to Linwood in the evening for the Open Graded meeting. I was keen to see whether increased weekly mileage would compensate for a lack of speedwork. There were 800m and 1500m races scheduled but the 1500m would have meant hanging around for over an hour, so I only entered the 800m, giving 2:09 as my PB and 2:10 as my anticipated time. It turned out that the heats were being run slowest tof astest, and the events were somewhat behind schedule, so I had to hang around for nearly an hour in any case. Although the meeting was fairly well attended, I was surprised to be placed in the third-fastest heat with some teens rather than the second-fastest, but it turned out that everybody in the next two races was well inside 2:10.
The kidz in my heat all set off much too fast and I was trailing badly at 100m, and still last but gaining on them at 200. At this stage I still thought I could win and started picking them off one by one, although having to go past on the outside while they were still fairly bunched was a bit of a nuisance. I went through 400m in 64 seconds and moved into second place 100m further on, although by now it was looking like the guy in the lead had built up too much of a gap. My time at 600m was 1:39 and I wasn't able to pick up enough speed to do anything except hold onto second place with a slightly disappointing time of 2:13.93. Afterwards I recovered fairly quickly. I would probably have done better in the 1500m where not having any leg speed wouldn't be so much of a factor.
2 comments:
Sounds like fun - makes me miss life on the fast track. Let me know when you are thinking about going to one of these meets again and I might join you.
I'll miss the last one of the series on August 27th but there's a CSSAL match on the 10th, also at Linwood. Garscube doesn't have a team so we run for Helensburgh. I think SAF membership may be required. There's always an 800m or a 1500m, and possibly a longer track event as well.
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