Friday I looked at the entry list and had the pleasant surprise that I only had to finish the hurdles to pick up a winners medal. That still wasn't a guarantee though. I was reminded of two things from hurdling with the MRR Juniors on Thursday night. Firstly that I can still hurdle, and secondly that the sprint hurdles are very high. So getting over 10 of them and collecting that medal was by no means nailed on.
Disappointingly, the race I should probably have done the 400m Hurdles that I was title holder of for so long, had no entries at all. I could have strolled round it, along with the much shorter hurdles and reclaimed my title.
Because the timetable has the Hammer throw starting first to try and get them out of the way before everyone else arrives I had to be up and on the road very early in the morning.
I got there in plenty of time to warm-up and had a couple of practice throws which both went really well. I took my first real throw fairly easy just to feel out my timing and try a single spin and got out to a comfortable 18.41m.
Then I started to get carried away and actually tried to put some speed and power into things. So the next couple throws were pretty terrible. I engaged my brain for round 4 and tried another gentle and sensible one, but clipped the cage and went out of the sector. And then I turned my brain off again and finished with two terrible off balance attempts to just power out a distance. So eventually ended up with my first throw being my best. Not quite what I had hoped for, but better than I feared. Enough to get 2nd place and a silver medal though, so happy enough with that.
Then I had nearly 3 hours until the 5k. I wandered round a bit and tried to do a bit of stretching. I watched some of the other races and had some breakfast.
I started fairly well, but even by the end of the first lap my legs were feeling a bit heavy. I expected to get lapped after about 4 and 8 laps. And right on queue at the 4 lap mark the two leaders cruised past. I still felt like I was going ok at this point and the times on the lap clock looked to be close to what I was expecting. 90 second laps was going to take me under 19 minutes. Even at the 3k point when the leaders passed me again (ahead of schedule) I was still only a few seconds off my planned pace. Through in 11:20 against a target of 11:15. But from there something must have gone horribly wrong as I ended up finishing almost a minute off my target. Time 19:37.6.
I can't see accurately how the pace changed because my garmin is still not uploading to their shitty software.
I did run a PB, taking a handful of seconds off the time I set back in 2008. And I did run well inside my annual target of 21:30 which seemed sensible when I wrote it in January. So I should be happy, but I am really not. I thought I would go about a minute faster than that. I am going to put my positive hat on and finish that with the realisation that I am unhappy about running over 10% faster than I thought I could even hope for at Xmas. Shows just how much better I am running that I consider a PB and 2 minutes under my annual target to be a 'bad' race.
Edit - I now have the Garmin output for laps so here is a more complete breakdown. Ignoring the first 200m, the first full lap was about 10 seconds too fast at 1:24. Then I run perfectly even 1:34 laps for the next 7 in a row. Then for some reason I dropped to 1:44, 1:40, 1:43 before picking back up at the end to 1:36 and 1:29. Those 3 slow laps cost me somewhere in the region of 26 seconds, which was basically the difference between a time I would really have been happy with and what I actually did. The rest to what I would have considered a perfect time leaked away at about 1-2 seconds a lap, which I can just put down to the wind as much as anything else.
Then I had to go straight to the hurdles. I did get a chance to do some warming up on the full height hurdles and I was managing to get over them safely enough. All I had to do from there was get to them and get between them. I had a couple of runs from the start just to try and figure out which way round I was going to start. Turns out my stride length is drastically shorter than last time I did the hurdles so I had to add a stride and switch my start round.
I only had one opponent and he was in a different age-group so he had shorter hurdles than I did. When the gun went I was yard ahead going into the first hurdle. Then I realised very quickly that my stride length was going to force me to a 5-stride pattern. That was still quick enough to keep me ahead of the Under-20 until I really battered hurdle 7 with my trail leg. Killed what momentum I did have and allowed him to pull past me. I managed to close that gap over the last three hurdles but not quite enough to get back into the lead. But finishing at all was enough to get my title back and a nice little medal for my collection.
Turns out I ran 22.00 secs. Considering that was into a -2.9m/s headwind and was only 3 seconds off a wind-assisted PB, I am really happy with that.
Then I started to get carried away and actually tried to put some speed and power into things. So the next couple throws were pretty terrible. I engaged my brain for round 4 and tried another gentle and sensible one, but clipped the cage and went out of the sector. And then I turned my brain off again and finished with two terrible off balance attempts to just power out a distance. So eventually ended up with my first throw being my best. Not quite what I had hoped for, but better than I feared. Enough to get 2nd place and a silver medal though, so happy enough with that.
Then I had nearly 3 hours until the 5k. I wandered round a bit and tried to do a bit of stretching. I watched some of the other races and had some breakfast.
I started fairly well, but even by the end of the first lap my legs were feeling a bit heavy. I expected to get lapped after about 4 and 8 laps. And right on queue at the 4 lap mark the two leaders cruised past. I still felt like I was going ok at this point and the times on the lap clock looked to be close to what I was expecting. 90 second laps was going to take me under 19 minutes. Even at the 3k point when the leaders passed me again (ahead of schedule) I was still only a few seconds off my planned pace. Through in 11:20 against a target of 11:15. But from there something must have gone horribly wrong as I ended up finishing almost a minute off my target. Time 19:37.6.
I can't see accurately how the pace changed because my garmin is still not uploading to their shitty software.
I did run a PB, taking a handful of seconds off the time I set back in 2008. And I did run well inside my annual target of 21:30 which seemed sensible when I wrote it in January. So I should be happy, but I am really not. I thought I would go about a minute faster than that. I am going to put my positive hat on and finish that with the realisation that I am unhappy about running over 10% faster than I thought I could even hope for at Xmas. Shows just how much better I am running that I consider a PB and 2 minutes under my annual target to be a 'bad' race.
Edit - I now have the Garmin output for laps so here is a more complete breakdown. Ignoring the first 200m, the first full lap was about 10 seconds too fast at 1:24. Then I run perfectly even 1:34 laps for the next 7 in a row. Then for some reason I dropped to 1:44, 1:40, 1:43 before picking back up at the end to 1:36 and 1:29. Those 3 slow laps cost me somewhere in the region of 26 seconds, which was basically the difference between a time I would really have been happy with and what I actually did. The rest to what I would have considered a perfect time leaked away at about 1-2 seconds a lap, which I can just put down to the wind as much as anything else.
Then I had to go straight to the hurdles. I did get a chance to do some warming up on the full height hurdles and I was managing to get over them safely enough. All I had to do from there was get to them and get between them. I had a couple of runs from the start just to try and figure out which way round I was going to start. Turns out my stride length is drastically shorter than last time I did the hurdles so I had to add a stride and switch my start round.
I only had one opponent and he was in a different age-group so he had shorter hurdles than I did. When the gun went I was yard ahead going into the first hurdle. Then I realised very quickly that my stride length was going to force me to a 5-stride pattern. That was still quick enough to keep me ahead of the Under-20 until I really battered hurdle 7 with my trail leg. Killed what momentum I did have and allowed him to pull past me. I managed to close that gap over the last three hurdles but not quite enough to get back into the lead. But finishing at all was enough to get my title back and a nice little medal for my collection.
Turns out I ran 22.00 secs. Considering that was into a -2.9m/s headwind and was only 3 seconds off a wind-assisted PB, I am really happy with that.
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