Events Blog

November 11th 2017 7.8 mile run (not 10k!!) My first every trail race! On a rather blustery and typically Welsh morning, I drove over from Swansea to the beautiful Gower peninsula. When arriving at Rhossilli I thought how dramatic the scenery looked, with the changeable weather and high tide! Registration involved a tediously long queue, during which I pondered the sense of wearing shorts (no one else was!) and not having brought some sort of shell to run in. Finally in the tent, I was given some sort of dongle thing around my wrist (which turned out to be my chip to insert at checkpoints - spot the novice!) and a fairly standard tee. The briefing ensured at 11am (odd, as this is normally a 2 minute silence) at which point the route and instructions were gone through in good detail. I still felt rather nervous as a first timer though, and the rain battering the tent wasn't helping. Soon afterwards though, we were off! The start was along a narrow track and then up a bit of...

March 19th 2017 10km trail running race Second running race of the year! Unfortunately timed to be coming off the back of a chest infection, and a very tight calf... However, after a week of rest (hence very little running prep) I thought I'd give it a go, if nothing else, to test my leg. With the aim of "just jogging around" (ha!) I did a mini warm-up (5 mins) then started the course. Unaware of the speed I was going at due to the distracting crowd of other runners, and my throbbing leg, I set off way too fast. Getting up to Jamboree, which leads to the first real downhill, I ws disappointed to find my HR up at max, and myself unable to take real advantage of the elevation change. The pebbly path down to the next pool didn't feel any nicer, and after than came a familiar climb (normally my final climb!) up to the wilder area of the park. This was follwed by a brief downhill respite towards Bracebridge pool before a horror of a muddy climb back up the same sl...

June 4th 2016 10k obstacle race My first ever obstacle race! So I needed to see what all the fuss was about. Tired of running past numerous "Tough Mudder" and "Wolf Run" t-shirts along the canal, I entered this (probably lesser version of an) obstacle race along with a female work colleague. Forty-six obstacles over 10k, sounds great, right? In actually fact, it was really good fun! The course was set up over 5k so we did two laps. We'd picked the earliest wave (09:30) which was great for two reasons - a) it's the least busy and least muddy and b) I'd accidentally booked myself in for two events in one weekend - oops! - so it gave me the maximum time to recover before a fairly hilly 8.5 miler the next day. I did make a couple of mistakes I realised though. Firstly, rather than entering just with my very slight colleague, what we should have done was enter with a team of huge, powerful men, to help us over some of the more challenging obstacles (...

May 1st 2016 10k race My first 10k. Preceded by some solid lunchtime training on the canals and a lot of food on Saturday... This race roughly followed the half marathon route, just cutting off the out-and-back extension to Bournville. This meant that it was largely familiar to me and I had had previous experience of The Hill at the end. What I was not expecting was to run indoors under the cricket ground at Edgbaston! I thought this was a nice quirk until I came out and realised that my GPS watch had lost signal and "autopaused" meaning for the remaining 3.5 miles of the race I wasn't entirely sure of my pace... Magda, myself and Sarah Pace-wise I'd gone into the race with a secret but very optimistic aim of going sub-50. Never having posted a sub 53 time, I knew this would be a challenge - but being just a training run I thought I'd give it a go. The Hill was from miles 4 to 5, so in order to keep an 8:03 pace average I knew I'd have to 'ba...