A true 10km practice

I'd booked us on a practice 10km run as it would give us a good feel as to how our training had been going. This event was held at Croxteth Country park in Liverpool and was sponsored by my work, Myerscough College. We had set off from Manchester with plenty of time to spare, and we needed a considerable amount of that time after getting lost several times, and having to put up with some broken traffic lights that seemed to be permanently on red!

After parking up, we still had a bit of time to kill. The weather was wet and cold, and waiting around wasn't altogether pleasant. When the race had started, Andy took the lead and overtook many other runners straight off from the start line. My initial thoughts were along the lines of "what on earth is he doing?" as I didn't think we'd be able to sustain that pace for more than a couple of minutes. We'd passed the first kilometre marker at 4 minutes 30 seconds. The quickest average we'd ever previously managed is about 5 minutes per kilometre.

By some miracle, we did keep up at around that pace, and finished the race with official times of about 45 minutes 20 seconds. Considering we'd performed poorly in our own training sessions, I'd walked a significant distance and height the previous day, and that I'd not eaten well but drunk lots, I'd say we did alright :) It gave me confidence for the real race in three weeks time, to say the least.