Race Review - NDXCL Forres

Here is my race report from 2013.

I can't really remember why I didn't race Forres in 2014. I dug into my 2014 blog and it seems that I was having some fairly major anxiety problems that week so I wasn't able to do a run at all and was in no state to go and try to race. 

I am in a much better place these days so I had no problems at all this year. 

I got in a decent warm up before the race and checked out some of the bits of the new course. The snow wasn't too bad and was all firm enough to run on. The sections in the trees had thawed out enough to be boggy in places. 

The first lap I was feeling quite good. Not really flying but I was moving along comfortably enough and managing to stay in amongst a similar group to my previous 2 races from this season. One of my team-mates was in the same group and we were working well together, keeping pressure on the group. As we came towards the end of lap one we started overtaking some traffic from the previous race. At one bottleneck I moved in behind the backmarker and gave my team-mate the space to move through, and something went really wrong. I have no idea what it was. I didn't hurt anything or get injured. I just suddenly couldn't go at that pace. I was comfortable enough to carry on running, although it quickly deteriorated to a jog. 

The group I had been with quickly made a gap and kept going away as I dropped nearly 2 minutes in the next mile. I was feeling fine about it, joking away with the marshalls and still ticking along. And the same for mile 5. Then there was the last little climb and I saw a guy in front of me walking up it. He still had about 20 seconds on me according to the watch, but I knew he was struggling and that was enough of an incentive for me to try and push on. 

Whatever had been wrong in miles 4 and 5 had gone away and I quite quickly got back up to a proper running pace. I managed to pass him easily enough on the downhill section and the last mile was actually my fastest of the whole race, by quite a bit.

Despite the bad couple of miles in the middle I am happy enough with the race. It wasn't what I wanted, or how I expected to run, but it wasn't completely terrible and certainly shows I am in a better place than this time last year.