BUPA London 10km,

The London 10k incorporated the UK:A championships and the organisers had offered an excellent incentive to clubs with £2000 for the winning team and cash prizes for the top 6 teams.  Myself, Matt Barnes and Andy discussed it and felt this would be worth our while. 

Myself and Andy travelled down the day before the race and stayed in a hotel at Heathrow airport, ready to drive to the race on the day.  We set off deliberately early on race day to allow for the fact that parking might be problematic but we got a spot near Trafalgar Square no problem.

We walked to a building where all of the elite and club athletes were basing themselves and this offered an opportunity to check out the opposition.  Morpeth, Tipton, AFD, Belgrave, Notts and Newham all looked good.  My tip was Lincoln who had a very useful trio in Doe, Bowser and Kimpton. 

After a bizarre 300m warm up loop up and down the road where we were based (everybody was using this loop), we returned to a very warm building a little dizzy, ready to get going.  With 20mins to go til the race start all bags were left in the building and the athletes were being walked to the start.  The start was very narrow and the “elite start” included up to six runners nominated by each UK:A affiliated club so it was a little crowded!  I didn’t seem to be affected by this and got a reasonable start, passing through a fast opening 2km in 5:54 well down the field.  This was some race.  I could see Andy up in the leading group maybe 10 seconds ahead and Matt was 3-4secs ahead of me. 

I had some regular rivals around me including  Martin Williams – fresh from Edinburgh Marathon the previous week – and Aaron Scott.  It was one of those races where positions were changing every minute, and these are the type of races I love, even if I’m not quite on top of my games at the moment.  I passed through 5km in around 15:15 which I was happy with as I felt if I had a good run I could run 30:30 which would be good progress from my 30:48 at Manchester.  One minute I was ahead of Aaron and Martin, the next we would be in a completely different order, not through sharing the workload but simply racing hard.  I seemed to maintain my position over the second half of the race with only a returning Ben Moreau coming past me at 8km but bizarrely everybody had run an inexplicably slow second half, I felt my 31:20 for 37^th place was a comparable run to my 30:48 at Manchester, and Tim Grose’s statistic analysis for runbritain supports this.  I’m not too fussed about the time, it was a great event, a super race and one that I will support again.

After scrutinisation, the team results were announced and Altrincham finished in 3^rd place behind Lincoln Wellington and Newham & Essex Beagles.  All three of us were delighted with this team result.  We all felt that we had ran “steady” personal races without any of us having a particularly good run.