Running from Zombies

Sunday started at 5am. Scribs had stayed over on Saturday night (for pasta, chocolate cake and a movie) to make travelling the next morning easier, so we managed to get on the road pretty quickly. Only took us about 2 hours to drive to London (the sunrise over the M6 was…er, nice), and parking was surprisingly easy, so we found snacks before wandering through the park to meet Matt.

We hung around for a bit, watching people arrive, then checked our bags and got into our time-designated ‘warm up zones’. It was actually pretty cold and so I joined in the mass warm up…not that it did a whole lot of good as we were then standing around in our starting pens for 25 minutes before running, but I attempted to keep my legs moving in the meantime.

The ‘white zone’ runners (that’s me) finally got going at around 10.15am…and I managed to press the wrong button on my Garmin, meaning I started in a bit of a state as I was trying to get the timer going. Got it sorted pretty quickly though (just as well the race was chip timed!) and got on with the running part of the day.

Route around the park for the 5k, starting on the right hand side and running south.

As I said in the pre-race post, I was hoping to break 28 minutes and was aiming for 5:30/km splits, which would put me nicely at 27:30. The first km was 5:23 and I thought there was no way I could keep up that pace for another 4 kms. As it happened, I just about did. The 4th km was a bit slower (someone put an incline in there, just silly really) but I made up for it at the end with a sprint finish. I must say that was partly due to Rachel, a girl I found I was running alongside for the whole race. We kept pace with each other and, when she went for it at in the last 300m, I followed. Well done to Rachel, who finished 1 second before me :-)

I stopped my watch at 27:11, but knew it was slightly off. I was sure I was well under the 28 minute mark though so I was happy. More than the time, I knew that I had run the fastest race I could have done in those conditions and so was happy regardless.

I collected my finisher’s bag, handed in my timing chip and then walked back down so I was about 50m from the finish line to cheer on Scribs and Matt. The coloured pens were staggered starts so there was a couple of minutes between us and plenty of time to see them get to the finish.

Matt, me and Scribble after the race.

Once we’d stretched, collected our bags and sat around investigating the contents the the goody bags, we headed off down Baker Street for an early lunch.

The official chip times were on the website by the time I got home. As I said on Monday, my time was 27:17, which put me 779th overall (out of 1722 finishers), or 186th out of the 802 women – which I’m actually quite impressed with! Scribs’ time was 30:42 and Matt’s was 31:23, which I think are pretty damn good for the amount of running they both do (or don’t). I also found out the Australians won the overall competition…boooo!

The event itself was pretty well organised. It obviously catered for more people than the 1700 that were actually there and so there were no queues for the toilets or the baggage stall. The big screen TV was a nice touch, and the staggered starts were appreciated as the narrow park paths don’t leave much room for overtaking. There was Powerade, a space blanket and a medal in the finisher’s pack, along with a granola bar, (male) shower gel and tea bag samples. Not bad.

There were cameras all over the course, and we were told the race was being aired on channel 5 that afternoon and on Sky Sports later in the week – though I’ve yet to see it on any of the TV listings. I also managed to get missed by every single official photographer so I have no photo for my races page! Oh well.

All in all, I was pleased with the event, my running and the company. Now just to convince Matt and Scribs to go back next year :-)