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Moraghan Training - Stevie G
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Bike today, but what the hell to wear as its 4C and foggy now but will be 15 and sunny coaming home!
Cant you comb it before you leave? ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-rWRsI3b0A
Accurate description of the 12 stage course on the overdone it thread. Will discuss on Friday!
enjoyed the race reports..and congrats to dachet, barlick and HHH in getting to the nationals.
We were at the midlands relays, where you will all be coming to race in a fortnight. i had an eventful day. i was going to be a short leg but we lost our top guy to england duty in the home national xc (who clashes the nationals with the home nations? bad organising) plus another of our better lads (a 31.30 10k chap) decided to race the england fell champs on the same day instead. meant i had volunteered for a long leg.
Warm up was good, i know the course well and our lead runner brought us round well in 8th. next long went well and we were still top 10. as i was entering the start pen i fall, on some tree roots i think. a proper comedy collapse. my foot is gone, shooting pains immediately. im helped to my feet by a competitor but i cant put any weight on it. i fall again i cant maintain my balance on the damaged foot. F**K what do i do? best option is to get to the team manager somehow and get someone else to take my place. maybe i will be ok by leg 12. i get to my feet, the pain is unbearable and i speed hop back down the course to our club tent. loads of people i know from other teams are trying to help, wondering what the hell is going on, and i just ask them to get me to my tent. i get there, take my vest off and give it to the fastest guy in our team who hasnt run yet (he is a 67min half chap) to his credit he reacts quickly to get ready, he hasnt warmed up and is getting his racers on as our runner passes us. we must have lost over a minute as my replacement was in the tent as previous chap had finished. team manager is bemused to see me lying in the tent and i say plan around me not be able to race so draft in the reserve but if the pain goes i will race a short later. i get st johns to look at it and they tell me there is no chance of racing today. i am strapped up and pissed off. i cheer the lads home, and the reserve ran brilliantly. we dropped to 11th at one point but our tail brought us back to 7th at the finish. we were about 40 seconds or so behind 6th. so i cost us that. but the team all had good performances. We qualified for the nationals which we are not entering as we have half the lads away on warm weather training camps in spain/USA. My foot ballooned up and is badly swollen, just going to rest for next week and see whats what. what a plank!
the midlands course and the fine weather brought out its share of idiots too. including some chap who let his dog off the lead on the course...as its a public park. he was informed that we werent worried about the runners but if his dog got squashed thats his look out.
I looked for your name in the north section and wondered why you weren't in there, forgetting that your XCs are always midlands! But clearly wouldn't have found you in the midlands!
Shame you won't be at the finals then!
Originally i thought i was 5th quickest of our 6, but i wasn't sure how quickly i'd stopped/started the watch at the handovers, or in fairness where the actual start/stop line was (there was a pen!)
As my watch time was 2 secs slower than a young guy's official time, i thought i had a chance of matching that at least...
Soit was a great surprise to see my watch 22:42 turn into a 22:26 (!). That's a big chunk to gain! And magically put me up to 3rd in our 6, delighted by that, 1second ahead of our team cap
Phil was right to mention that a good 10 or so teams dropped out from leg 1 to 12, so some of the positions gains throughout aren't necessarily down to overtaking, but i'm pretty sure my 3 position gains should be right. One came about 20metres in, and anothre about 400metres in, so i remember those very well!
I can drop the banter with the captain that his leg was easier as he had a personal pacer/windbreak for 90% of it, whereas i was trying to haul my feeble frame through wind alone for most of it
Obviously my miniscule chance of weasling a short leg in the nationals has now died!
30seconds behind our leg 1 guy's time, and i'd be delighted to be 30seconds behind his 16.17 recent 5k time on Friday
Yes Dean - very plankish behaviour, but obviously after the Watford pub incident, I'm not one to talk! Hope it clears up soonish, hopefully OK for the nationals?
Solid performance then SG - I'm pretty happy with my 13.56 after being a bit crocked for a few weeks, 2nd fastest short leg in the team..only a measly 59 seconds behind Lewis (fastest short leg of the day). Seems to stand up pretty well looking at the results. Had a scan through the vid, I've skilfully avoided being on there at all by the looks of it.
I seem to have annoyed one of the guys doing the results with my pithy facebook post. But the SEAA do need to let folk know whats going on with the results. Even to say there's been a glitch and they are being typed out by hand.
I did see DT2 in the results. Could have sworn he wrote on my fb status that he "may" be there as support as he was injured or something. Instead he did a cracking leg!
I'll see what abuse you've written
Phil is probably sniffing through the video in slow mo looking for you as we speak!
Dean, take care. You know that a few days extra rest now will avoid weeks of problems later if you try and come back too quickly.
He's in the B team in their results, so they either have 2 with the same name, it was him on the quiet, or some sort of shenanighans have taken place :-)
And when I said he did a "cracking" leg, I must admit I just presumed, as he was actually a few seconds slower than me
will do phil, its really frustrating but i have to be mindful of getting the correct recovery and not try and be a hero and come back to soon.
Its possible DT2 name was on the list of reserves and they ended up drafting in someone else who ran in his name.
Simon - fast leg. i read your facebook post and the problem with admin in athletics (and football) is its normally done by old timers in their spare time. and any request for more modern approach is met with " well you do it then!" All they have to do is say results will be posted by sunday 6pm or sooner then everyone knows where they are. I know someone who does the results and he is as dedicated as can be...it takes hours and hours to do so we appreciate the hard work that goes into it... mind you why they cant just charge teams a few more pounds and then have chip timing like the national xc.
Ouch Dean - both painful and incredibly poor timing! Hope it heals quickly...
All this excited talk about the relays makes me slightly sad I'm not in a club!
i used to put a shift of 2-3hours in for the Marlow 5k (!), so I can appreciate how much effort there is in these much more complicated results!
While waiting for Phil to come in, I noticed some guy who was completing his 2nd out of 3 laps, monstered through the 3rd leg funnel, to the bemusement of the officials. I bet there's loads of those sort of scenarios they do amazingly to manage.
Bus, Battersea park 3x1mile, we'll have to get some of that relay action going on in the spring/summer.
I was very tempted today Phil...so that would have ruined it already
I'd say that's pretty bad luck Dean. Sounds like a ligament job. I'm trying to imagine where the tree roots are on the course.
Same course as last year I can now see. The course where I ended the years running. Tough though isn't it? Back of the loop has enough up hill drags to murder anyone. Into the wind, even worse.
Reading the relay reports made me think 'I'm glad I'm not involved'. That's not what I used to feel like. But stuff that side of things. It's just age and the diminishing ability.
11 miles yesterday. Uphill into the wind for 5 to 6 miles gave me an average pace of 7:50 ish. By the time I got home the average was 7:27. I didn't feel I was pushing the pace but on reflection, I reckoned I wasn't going to run any faster than I was. So that must have been a threshold effort.
Today - nothing - didn't feel like running at all. Hmm!
Anyway - well done to all relay runners and competitors - which are each and the same thing.
One thing of note from the video is how slow and heavy the runners appear, even at the sharp end. That's after watching runners such as Mo Farah.
Now that I've left Harrow AC, I can now say without redress that the fastest runner in the club right now was at the back of the field on the first leg. It's a real shock to realise that though he looked total crap. He can still do around 72/73 for a HM.
I shudder to think what I must look like. My lad gave me some idea when he mentioned that if I was a horse in a race, they'd put some screens around me and...
Yea, right!
🙂
I watched last year's vid, and people well under sub 5 pace seemed like they were barely moving, so i'm not surprised the wind made it look that way!
Having said that, people looked pure magic on the outward stretch!
Checked with DT2, wasn't him!
Chip timing versus manually recording upto 1,000 runners times. Hmm....
Philip - I'd have laid odds on it being SG, but I suspect it might happen tonight!
It will only just be light enough to run shortly. Please dont ever let those eejuts get there way who want BST all year round! For most of thw wimter it just means darkness both ends of the day!
There is a session on my schedule that has that, with 400mx2 and 200mx2 on the end, but a few days after the relay, this seemed plenty.
Bit of wind, but all 5 reps came out either dead on 80sec lapping across the 2.5 laps or slightly under average.
Doing anywhere near that on Friday would be marvellous!
or even replicating the 30seconds slower than our recent 16.17 5k guy as per Saturday.
We'll see though.
Things could definitely be done better. This is a UKA sanctioned event so all entries should be online and use the UKA registered athlete database so there should be no need to type names by hand.
It would make life easier, even if you don't need chip-to-chip times.
I did the long version of Whiteleaf yesterday - "Official Top 100 Climbs no.23" - and got a PB, but only the second time done. It put me in 580th out of 6683, but I spotted a member of this thread just shy of 300 places ahead of me. Even more impressive was his was in the middle of a 64 miler!
SG, great to see you enjoying the big event there, and a very handy leg for the team too. Likewise, very nice leg from PMJ. Fantastic result for Datchet qualifying for the Nationals. It's pretty impressive that Datchet even got a team out, and they look to have been the only Berkshire club to have done so. Both a testament to them (and Rob's persuasive nature maybe!) and a bit of a comment on the bigger name clubs in the county who couldn't muster a team at all.
Kind of frustrating for me, wondering what might have happened had we got a team out.
Dean, that's a bit of a shocker. It must be some kind of thread record for getting injured just before a race. Hopefully the swelling dies down and it doesn't disrupt you too much, and at least the club managed to finish a team.
Stonking work from Matt, and the whole thing sounds a little bit ridiculous with parkgoers all over the shop.
Likewise, a fine leg from Simon, and another going to the Nationals.
It's true that fast runners can look a little slow on these videos. But I suppose, in absolute terms, to the naked eye of someone standing watching, there is not a huge difference between something moving at 12.5 mph (a top class 48 minute 10-miler) and 10 mph (a 60 minute 10-miler). So you're mainly looking at cues from how the runners look, and that is entirely dependent on their form and running style, which isn't a reliable way to judge at all. If you're moving yourself, and getting overtaken, it's much easier to tell as you have a better frame of reference.
Felt shocking yesterday, and thought that illness was well and truly descending, but everything fine again today, so did 8 x 500 in the park as a bit of a speed endurance session. Couldn't be arsed timing it.
Entered the Highgate 10,000 night. Well up for that one.