Sunday 26 June 2011

Race: Staplehurst Carnival & Fete 10km

My third 10km race, a (fairly) flat course, decent weather, good training, well rested, well hydrated, well fed - Everything was in place for a good race!

Firstly my race pack never arrived in the post so I had to arrange for a replacement number to be available upon arrival in Staplehurst. We arrived with an hour to spare, went to the race HQ and collected my hand-written duplicate race number (no.18).

There were 118 participants in today's race, it's quite nice to take part in these smaller events (I'm not a fan of the mass warm-up sessions and excessive branding you get at some larger races).

I should also mention that it was quite a hot morning, muggy and overcast up until the race started, during the race we had bright sunshine - The high for the day was forecast to be around 28 degrees Celsius.


...in the light blue shirt


The course was nice, we started off on a side road for 500 metres before going out onto the main road, being a small event there were no road closures, the main road wasn't too busy and all the drivers I encountered gave plenty of space for the runners while overtaking.

Thankfully we soon turned off the main road and onto some very quiet single track country lanes that weaved between farms, and with views of the beautiful Kent countryside. The race description said that it was a flat course, I'd say it was slightly undulating, whatever it was it was definitely flatter than the other two 10km races I've done. We followed these lanes around for the next 8km and then came back out onto the main road to head back to the finish.



I was so happy to finally reach the end


The last 250 metres or so were slightly uphill and after running at a strong pace for almost 10km it felt like I was running up a steep hill rather than along a slight incline! I had nothing left in me for a finishing kick, to be honest just keeping moving was a real struggle for most of the last 3km, but I did keep moving and my splits show that I kept an almost even pace for the entire race.

Click - ( GPS Map ) to see the map of the course from my GPS data, if you click on the summary tab you can see my splits, my GPS didn't register it as the full 10km but it has been known to be slightly out before, also I faffed around before pressing stop at the end, so the last km split time shows it to be longer than it actually was!


You've got to have the medal shot...


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My official finish time was 42:07 - A new personal best..... by over 5 minutes!!
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The race organisers ( Nice Work ) have a blog and have put the results up ( here ), I came in 22nd position out of 118 participants.



...and you've got to have the family shot (does that sound wrong? oops)


As always, the wife took the photos - thank you again, but this time both of our 'real' cameras' batteries ran out before the race started (silly, I know). Luckily we had two mobile phones that have cameras that we could fall back on - We had four devices capable of taking photos with us in total - and that just seems normal these days.


7t.
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