Abbey Dash - November 2007
I always seem to come to this race hoping that things will go well and then find myself making excuses for not having had the best of performances. This year turned out to be no different, but I enjoyed participating and it remains a great race which I will look forward to entering again next year. Things have been stressful and not very good all year at work, this has led to loss of training time due to extra work, to catching just about every bug going and missing training for that reason and to comfort eating - and I'm sure increased weight won't be helping those 'speedy legs' as my son puts it! Anyway, enough of this and on with the race.
This is a big 10K that starts and finishes in the centre of Leeds. The course had been altered slightly this year, so technically it isn't a like for like comparison. But really, most of it was the same. In previous years the race began down by the International Pool and headed out towards Kirkstall Abbey along the bottom road, this year it began up on the Headrow, heading straight out from there. The other difference in the route was once you've reached the Abbey, previously the runners enetered the Abbey grounds briefly and used them as the turnaround, this year we went just past that entrance and turned around in the road - lots of marshalls there, presumably to make sure we didn't forget!
My family came with me and were surprised by what a big event this race is, there was a pretty good field of elite runners ready to zoom off at the front and thousands of ordinary people packed in ready for the aerobic warm up. My kids stood on the steps out of the crush and joined in with some of the moves from there. It was a bit of a squeeze for doing the warm up, but it gave us a laugh and the usual friendly atmosphere came to fore.
You can never expect a quick start for this race unless you are one of the hares at the front. Otherwise it's best to resign yourself to meandering over the line and then getting going from there. I think it took me about ten minutes to get to the start line. Not that it matters, this is a chipped race, so you'll get your own time in the end anyway.
I felt my running went okay, I wasn't sure how it'd be as I hadn't been running very far. In fact it was the furthest I'd run for quite a while. So, that said, I was pretty pleased with managing to keep going for the entire race, no walking for me this time. I was using some of what I'd been doing at the tri-club to give me something to focus on. Morgan had been talking about keeping your cadence up and counting it every now and then to see if you were managing to maintain it, or if it was dropping as the race went on. So, each time I came to a distance marker I counted my steps for the next minute. My cadence hovered around the 90 mark for the whole race, whether that's because I unconsciously speeded up when I was counting or not, I don't know, but it did help to keep me going and to give myself something to focus on when I was finding things tough.
I completed the race in 1:03:04, which I was happy enough with and gladly collected my t-shirt and my bottle of water. My previous times are as follows: 2003 - 56:46; 2004 - 57:11; 2005 - 59:47; 2006 - 1:09:40; so I've at least managed to pull a little back there. This was an improvement! But the most important things are that it's a well organised and enjoyable race, that I enjoyed doing it and will gladly go back for my sixth running next year.
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