It’s done.
I have a bit of a confession. I ate a lot yesterday - nothing junky, but I did eat a bag of dried fruit and nuts that weighed in at around 1500 calories. (That was in addition to other food - quark with blueberries, a baked potato with butter, salmon and salad, and a bag of raw carrots). The diet I’ve been on is low carb and low cal and whilst I can survive on it, it’s not ideal for getting through a 9 mile run so I decided more cals and carbs were needed for today. I was also hoping the dried fruit would clear out my, uh, blockage (it did).
Anyway, I felt pretty good when I got up - as good as one can feel in the morning at any rate. Weather was grey but not rainy, thankfully. Got my train to Richmond, met another runner on the train who was on her own and we started chatting, and then we both met another girl in the queue for the toilets so it was nice to have some folks to chat to before. They waited for me afterwards as well, which was nice (although we all went our separate ways after that).
Richmond Park is pretty nice - it’s like a chunk of countryside within London. (Technically Richmond is just outside London, but the urban sprawl has swallowed it. Most people consider it to be in London, at any rate). It has deer (Henry VIII brought them there so he could go hunting) which we didn’t see, but in general it’s a nice setting. The route was all trail, though we did have to cross a few roads which were not closed, and hope the motorists stopped for us. The paths were also still in use by the public including cyclists so we had to keep an eye out for them as well.
I felt good for the first part, then sciatica started to kick in around 4km. It wasn’t really bad at this point but I could feel it. Went through 5km feeling strong but then there was a bit of a hill at 6km which hurt a bit! Thankfully there was a nice downhill stretch at 8km which gave me some momentum and I felt good again until around 10K (which I went through in about an hour and one minute, more or less as expected).
After that it started getting harder. Sciatica was being a real bitch but I kept at it. To finish we had to go past the start, run another couple of km and then come back again, so it was quite tough seeing all the people who had already finished and knowing I still had some way to run. I didn’t enjoy running up to the turnaround - my arse, hamstring and groin were all making their displeasure known - but once I was heading for the finish I got into a bit of a race with a large dreadlocked man and we ended up sprinting through the finish together.
The unfortunate thing is that I think the course was a bit short - more like 14km and a little bit. My time was about 1 hr 25 (I’ll get the official time by email) and I know for a fact I’m more of a 10 minute miler. In training, a 9.5 mile run took me 1 hr 40, so 1:25 is very fast, even allowing for sprint finishes.
Still, I’m happy I got it done. I raised £315 for the Stroke Association and I’d like to offer a huge thank you to everyone who donated - I really appreciate it.
The only shitty bit was getting home. Unfortunately the nearest station to the finish is a small one that gets two trains an hour and I had to wait nearly half an hour there (whilst sweaty and getting colder and colder), then another 12 minutes at Clapham Junction for the second train. Thank fuck no one stole my coat! But I’m home now and, sciatica ache aside, happy to have this all done. Cheers.
