A quick glide around East Midlands Airport

Race day then! As I explained in my last post, running has taken a huge back seat since September when everything else in my life went into crazy overdrive. So I went into today's race with no expectation other than to soak up the once-in-every-15-years opportunity along with the race day atmosphere and take in the scenery as I trotted around the airport for about 6 miles.

Right from the start it was a great experience (helped in no small part by the spot-on organisation) right from "check in" number collection and the familiar pre-race nerves barely even surfaced, despite roaming around on my own for an hour until my fan club arrived. It was a bit surreal really being at the sort-of closed airport surrounded by a few thousand other people donning their best Lycra eagerly anticipating the starting gun.

I'm not going to lie, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows, it was flipping cold! I put off dropping my bag and hoody with the baggage handlers for as long as I possibly could but all too soon it was time to do the final bits of prep and head to my pen ready to start.

As soon as the first wave set off it seemed to take no time at all until I was crossing the starting line myself and heading off along the route. After about five minutes I was nice and warm and able to start properly enjoying the run. As I trotted along I really thought about how lucky I was to be a runner, to be able to take in these scenes normally reserved only for airport staff, surrounded by loads of other people all rhythmically putting one foot in front of the other and seeing off the November chills.

At around 3.6km the leader came past me and the people running around me, he seemed to breeze by with ease on his second lap! After that it was easy to recognise the second-lappers flying by the rest of us, it was a great motivator (I'd like to say it was from their running but it was definitely more from following all those lovely shoulders and well chiselled calves!)

To be honest it was a pretty uneventful run other than that - that's not to say I didn't enjoy it, it was brilliant!! But I didn't have any major struggles (ran all the way which doesn't happen massively often), and there was no other drama to report. As such, before I knew it I was passing the 9km marker and was very nearly done!

I'm not going to lie, despite all my "I've barely trained so I'm going for enjoyment not time" talk, I did keep half an eye on my (shiny new) TomTom as I made my way around the course, and I could see that I was going to come in at well below my estimated time of about 1:05. Surprisingly, I came in at 1:01:54 which is up there in my best times ever and a good 4 minutes improvement on last weekend's 10k!

So all in all, it was a great morning to round off my race calendar for 2016. I'm nowhere near finished running for this year though - after a bit of thought I've decided I'm going to go for an advent running streak attempt - at least 30mins a day from the 1st until the 24th December. It will be tricky getting it in some days but I reckon it will be worth the satisfaction by the time Santa comes! As always, I'm sure I'll have at least one overly long and waffley blog post to detail my progress.

Finally, here's some photos from today, thanks for reading!

Ready and raring to go!

 

The obligatory post-race pint

 

Flying feet! Also check my new leggings, definitely helped the family spot me!

The non running runner.

I've been wanting to write this blog for quite a while, hence the long quiet patch. Coincidentally, I've not had time to write a blog about not having time to run.

The week or two after the half marathon were weird. At first there was the initial post-race comedown I've seen so many other runners writing about so much. It was horrible. For a good few days I had a full attack of mardyitus - I was mardy, miserable and probably not very nice to be around. My gym sessions felt weird as I didn't have a target to work to so I didn't really know what to do with myself.

Eventually this wore off a bit, not least helped by me epic fundraising total of almost £400!!! for the Royal British Legion, which I'm really proud of and still so humbled by everyone's generosity!

So back to running, or lack of it! After my couple of weeks being mardy I came to the realisation that my next 10k race was only six weeks away and I seemed to find some new wave of motivation from somewhere. I had a couple of really good treadmill interval sessions (as much as some people hate it, I actually love a good treadmill session!) and was feeling much better about everything.

Skip forward to one Sunday a couple of weeks ago and to one of my least favourite experiences as a runner yet! Trotting along the road, about two miles into what I was planning on being about 5 miles and I heard a weird noise and felt a sharp pain in my knee. It didn't take me long to realise that the "bad-men" in the tinted window golf who had just passed and were now looking at me had thrown something. I ran on a couple of paces then realised that it bloody hurt and I was very sad and burst into tears. I then proceeded to cry all the way home. When I got home I looked where the pain was and saw what was quite clearly a bloody BB gun mark. The bastards!!!

Anyway to cut a long story short, my running has just gone down hill since then. Not because of that, I'm not the kind of girl to let a pair of skallys put me off doing something I love! Essentially, life has got in the way and running has unfortunately taken bottom place on the list of things to do.

It's not that I don't want to run. For a while running has been my release when I'm having a shitty day/week/month, but unfortunately the weeks I've had have been a matter doing whatever task has the biggest repercussions of not being done. And as much as I don't want to run a rubbish time at the end of the month, that's been trivial compared to passing exams/meeting deadlines/being a good Brown Owl.

So I've not ran. Not much anyway. I managed to push out a struggle of a 5k last weekend and that's been it for a couple of weeks. There are now less weeks until my next 10k since it was since I last ran 10k. I've even thought about pulling out but the route is one that probably won't come around again for 15-20 years so I'm not going to miss it, even if it means my last race of the year is my slowest.

I've got two weeks and two days and I'm going to do my best not to get too wound up, I'll train as and when I can but feel like until the end of June (when I finish my CIM) running might just to have to take a bit of a back seat. Suppose it's a good thing then that I didn't get a place in London 2017. Kind of.

As always I've waffled twice as long as I intended, so thanks for reading if you got this far!