Conversation with the T-shirt person:

Me – Is this where I pick up my t-shirt?
Her – Yes absolutely. What’s your name?
Me – [tells her…then waits… then takes the sheet from her to find my name – I didn’t feel I could do it with the electoral commission people, but I can do it with a fun run organiser]
Her – So you ordered an XXL?
Me – That’s right [you want to say it louder, lady? I am not sure that the skinny bint over there in the XXS *heard* you]
Her -[rummaging] The XXL only comes in black.
Me – That’s fine. [Well, duh, it’s *slimming*]

So it was a lovely course, but given that my running log for the last three weeks shows one very ordinary 4km run, I wasn’t bursting with confidence. Met up with heaps of ausrunners which was very cool. Morseyruns introduced me to a very drunk friend of hers at the start line which was fun (hehe).

The first lap I was trying to make sure that my friend Tiger Boy didn’t lap me, so every time I heard footsteps over my shoulder I panicked. Freak passed me in sight of the finish line. I really tried to swear at him but I am pretty sure that he didn’t hear me over the top of my heaving breath. I should say that he made up for me by running me home in the last 500m just when I was begging the running Gods that he would do just that. Little does he know that he is now obliged to lock in to help me out for the rest of my running career while he might otherwise becoming a leading light in the Vic Aths scene [evil laugh] (well at least until he stops lapping me).

Seeing as I was trying to treat this as a training run, it was actually much easier to do that on the separate lap as I was pretty much running on my own, and it was lovely. It started to get a bit darker going through the Zoo the second time and I started telling the volunteers my only goal was to get back before dark. The one big advantage of a loop course was I knew what I still had before me and it was down hill most of the way to the finish line, which was a big relief. The first time around (when I was trying to finish before getting lapped) the bloody race organisers tricked me by making me think that I just had a corner and a brief straight to the finish, but then they made me go out around another whole big loop!! Tricky race organisers.

Nudge was obviously freaking at the concept of a city run after work and kept spitting out the weirdest numbers. He kept measuring the distance very short and therefore telling me I was running very slow. I was getting really depressed at the 9min kms he was spitting at me, until I crossed the line and learnt that he had just been goading me.

Gun time only was 63:XX which is not a PB but is my second best 8K time ever. I will definitely take that as with the interrupted training and preparation I completely ran out of puff in the last half of the race. Hopefully I will be in better shape for the rest of the series and might even be able to give the PB a bit of a crack.

UPDATE – official time 1:04:04 (which is just wrong), gender 158/161

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