National Road Relay Championships

By Saturday morning I had improved enough to take part in the relays at Livingston, although if the race hadn't been on I would have waited at least another day before trying to run again. Other assorted injuries meant I was on the first leg. This would have been fine if I had been able to train properly for the past few weeks, but I knew that sooner or later I would fall behind the group I would normally have considered my rivals. Opted for the Newton Motus as a decent compromise between speed and injury protection, as recently it had seemed easier to run in the Newton Distance S than the adiZero Tempo. I couldn't risk a warm-up but as soon as the race started I felt not too bad and was pretty sure of making it round OK. The pack in front of me started to stretch away within the first mile, and I started to find every hill a lot harder than it should have been. The last mile was really hard work and I felt very slow, but I was still holding my position in the field and only moving up or down a place very occasionally. I lost a place in the finishing straight due to being unable to sprint, and handed over to Ben in 26th place with about a dozen runners less than a minute ahead of me.

I had predicted a time of 18:something, so 17:55 wasn't too bad, and was our fastest short leg of the day. It also wasn't too far down on previous years, although I have evidently lost quite a bit of fitness - won't bother entering the Polaroids unless I can resume proper training very soon. The diversion in the last mile made the course look as if it was going to be shorter, although after measuring it with gmap-pedometer there didn't seem to be much difference after all. Using GPS, it came out at 3.07 miles, giving me a 5:50/mile average. Ben made up a load of places to bring us up to 9th, and Joe on the fourth leg took us into 7th before we finished 9th, equalling our best performance from 2 years ago.

Pace splits: 5:41, 5:59, 5:54
Weekly total: 10 miles