Met League

My coach Nick is keen for me to persist with this ridiculous XC malarkey and so I guested in the Met league this week. The Met league is pretty high quality and I'd had an easy week leading into this, but also had the distractions of turning 30 (!) and a work Christmas party. Celebrations were not over the top, but also not completely absent. 

The race was in Ruislip and I hadn't had time beforehand to see the course but was led to believe it was a narrow course and hard to get past people. I'd had a sore hamstring all week so didn't want to go too fast early on, which meant I was in the teens on the narrow first 800m. I was having to move over the long plants to get past people to get in touch with the front group and as we entered the woods I was in about 10th place but quickly moved past a group of people containing Nick Torry, Dave Mitchinson, Ian Leitch and Matt Shone. This gives an idea of the quality of this league that even when I was oast these guys, I still had Glen Watts and Nielsen Hall ahead of me who had moved away already. Over the next mile I caught Glen Watts who had dropped off of Nielsen. The next 4 miles of the erace were round winding woods with some sharp hills in. The going was stony, and then muddy and some very slippy bits also. I spent 3.8 of these 4 miles trying to get past Glen Watts, who wasn't going to let me past at any cost! Every itme I tried to get past, he would surge and hold onto the lead. I think I eventually got bored of trying to get past and just sat in behind. Nielsen had grown his lead to 15 seconds or so and I was losing hope of being able to catch him. Of the 2 laps in the woods, we gained on him a bit on the 2nd one but I had no idea when the race was going to end. Then Glen got away and gained a few yards and before I knew it we were back out on the field and I couldn't bridge the gap. Nielsen was 12 seconds ahead of Glen, who was 4 secs ahead of me. 4th was Frank Baddick about 15 seconds back. 

I was initially disappointed with the race. Glen was 2 places behind me at Liverpool and I wanted to be challenging Nielsen more. I know I'm in good shape though and I'm just not that great at cross country. Bring on the roads!