Race Review - North District XC Champs, Elgin

Here is last year's report. Although it seems to jump four miles or so in the middle. Here is 2013's report. 

I was still suffering with really tight hamstrings from Spin class on Thursday. In the morning I tried a yoga session and some stretching to ease them off. That made everything else feel better but my hamstrings didn't improve. For the drive to the race I put the heated seats on hoping that warming them through might help but that didn't really make any difference. 

I parked the car at my parents house, put on a load of extra clothes for the cold drizzle and headed up the mile of hill to the race course. I did learn from previous years and remembered to change into my race shoes on the way up the hill before the first of the wet and muddy sessions. I got registered, chatted with a few people and tried to do a bit of a warm-up. Hamstrings were having none of it. 

I decided to start near the back and just take the first lap easy. I was hoping that once I got moving my hamstrings would ease off. The first mile or so is a nice wide track so I was able to take it easy and spot a couple of the guys I normally race against. With my sensible head on I decided to let them go, but try and keep them in sight. That worked fine for the first mile or so but then I realised that keeping them at 50m in front meant I was running at their pace anyway. I was actually starting to feel a bit more comfortable and my hamstrings stopped complaining just as we came in to a thinner section where overtaking is tough. 

A few of the runners in front of me were trying to pick lines of good surface. Since I know the woods so well I know that there is always a good surface. Sometimes it is under a puddle, or a few inches of soft mud, but it is there. So I was able to just charge through the softer sections while they were tip-toeing round the edges. This meant a bit of bunching, as I closed on them through the trickier technical sections. Just at the end of the lap there is a short climb and I tripped on a root. I managed to catch myself but my abs tensed as my core engaged to help my balance and suddenly spin class seemed like a bad idea again. 

The second lap was much better though. I was managing to pick off places, not just individual places, but whole groups. I coasted past my two team-mates that I had been trying to keep in sight on lap 1 and I picked off over a dozen places on lap 2. I was running really well on the hard surface landcover tracks now that there was space to pick a decent line, and through the technical sections I was still passing people. 

Then, just coming uphill towards the end of lap 2 I had a bit of a disaster. Going round a left hander I slid on a root. Obviously it must have looked like quite a spectacular slide as both the marshalls and the guy behind me asked if I was ok. I was fine, but again my core had decided to work a bit too hard to keep my balance. This time it had called a couple of muscles in my back to help and they decided not to let go. It felt like someone had stuck a stanley knife into the back of my kidney. I was still running well so I carried on but now I had problems when I tried to push the pace it felt like the little stanley blade in my back was being given a little wiggle so I had to back off. And that was the last of the overtaking. 

It felt like I was now dragging myself around at a terrible slog. Garmin says otherwise as the pace was pretty comparable to the previous laps. I was still running well enough but just not making any progress against the rest of the field. 

I haven't seen the results yet but garmin says the time was a couple of minutes faster than either of my previous runs on this course, and I was ahead of quite a few people that I would normally expect to lose to so I expect to be pretty happy.

Update 52nd place out of 83 in 42 mins 37. Bearing in mind that this race was the Championships and that skewed the quality of the field I am still happy with that.

All in, a good run on a great course. Just a shame I hadn't prepared slightly better the last couple of days leading in to it.