Well back in the land of the living now and I have had time to reflect on the Champs.  Obviously I was very disappointed in my run during the final, but I was so tired I just didn’t have the legs!  Indoor running can sometimes give a strange perspective on the events.  What I mean in my case is that in the 1500 for example, my indoor times are competitive, (maybe due to underachieving outdoors?!) yet runners like Rui Silva are 8 seconds quicker than me outdoors, this is a guy who ran 1.46 for the last 800 of the Athens Olympics 1500!  On the rankings this year I think I went into Turin ranked 9^th of those guys who were in attendance.  I felt that if I made it through to the final then I could be competitive.  What I did find was that getting through the heat seemed to take so much out if me I simply had nothing left for the final.  I was happy with my tactics, I wanted to make it physical over the first 600 but then I was done, no excuses, just not good enough!  I suppose if you look at our National Champs I can easily qualify for the final running around 3.50 ish in the heats, which is pretty easy running, then come back the following day and run low 3.40’s.  In these competitions you are trying to run low 3.40’s to get through and then back it up the following day which I wasn’t able to do.  Most of my competitors in the final, like the Spanish and Rui Silva are all low 3.30 guys at best outdoors so for them to run 3.41/2 to qualify is like me running 3.51/2.  They have been running far more within themselves and so were able to recover better than I did, and that really showed, especially as the final was slow.  Unfortunately in this sport there is no hiding place and even if you are 5% off your best you can get dropped and look foolish.  I’m hoping people will not just look at the result and think Speaight did rubbish!  For me it has been a long hard few years and this actually has probably been my most successful indoor campaign ever, and out of all the Championships I have done this has been the first major final I have made, so I have to take some heart from that and be proud to some extent.  I realise that there is much work to do and I have to improve my strength, as it is simply not good enough to compete at the very highest level once you run on consecutive days.  We saw at the British Grand Prix that indoors I can be competitive with the very best in the world given the right race, but I need to be more consistent and stronger!

So I am now going to take a week off, Thursday I am off to Switzerland to see my girlfriend and hopefully we will get a couple of days skiing in before getting back to the grindstone, which I am so looking forward to its not even funny (the skiing and girlfriend, not the grindstone!) and with a £10 flight you just can’t go wrong!  I have been doing lots of quality for some time now and I need to get away from the track and start the long slow process of rebuilding my base for the summer.

I was hoping to write regular blogs whilst I was over in Turin to keep people up to date with what was going on, but the internet access was too expensive so I didn’t get around to it, so for that I apologise.  What I did do instead was take a camcorder and film a video.  I have taken loads of footage which needs to be trawled through and edited, but I hope that it will give a unique insight into the trials and back ground situations that are presented at a major championships.  Hopefully we can get this done within a week or two.

Thanks for reading.

Sp8y