Greater Manchester Cross Country Championship

Just six days after returning to racing after injury in the Manchester League, I was back at the same venue for the Greater Manchester Championships.

I’d been told during the week that Andi Jones, Gareth Raven and Carl Hardman were all running.  Given my time off and suspected lack of fitness, a medal looked like it would be a very tall order, although the league race had offered some signs of encouragement finishing 2^nd to Raven only losing contact on the final lap.  This week would be made tougher by the fact I had put in a lot of miles – 104 in total and I was feeling very tired.  I’m playing catch up on these guys and can’t afford to ease down for races where the result isn’t overly important.  Races like this are purely very good workouts to accelerate my return to fitness.

I commented in last weeks race report how I remembered the 2010 league race on this course going off so fast due to the very long downhill footpath that comes just 300m into the race and how I was left some way down the field that day, fortunately I was in superb shape at the time and won by approximately a minute.  Last week, I was conscious of what happened in 2010 and started quickly.  This week, I went off as fast as my legs would allow me to, but this wasn’t very fast and I was left lagging!

Andi Jones made his usual bullish start and took a few eager beavers and lunatics with him.  As we hit the football fields at the bottom of the hill, I could see 4 Salford runners at the head of the field: Jones, Hardman, Joe Bailey and Ben Riddell.  Raven had made a late decision not to race but his clubmate Niall Brooks was in 5^th place ahead of two Bury runners, two Stockport runners, two Trafford runners and my teammate Nick Leigh.  I was 13^th and already the leaders were some way ahead!

You know you’re not having the best of days when you complete the first lap and hear comments from spectators such as “what’s wrong with Dave?” and “come on Dave, think where you should be!”.  I felt that they’d all gone off like maniacs, I was confident I’d peg most of them back but the gap to the front guys was already a little worrying.  I was never going to beat Jones but the rest I should stand a chance against, even in my current state!

Climbing the nasty hill at the end of lap one and I started to motor past a few and was up to 8^th as we hit the second lap, which quickly became 6^th as I passed two more of the ambitious starters.  There was a fair gap for me to close on the next three runners Bailey/Riddell/Brooks with Hardman  starting to go away from those three.  I was going to have to work hard on these next 2 laps and just run through this tiredness.  It took me a full lap to catch up to Bailey and Riddell and as we moved into lap 3, there was still a pretty big gap to Brooks and Hardman.  Bailey is a 30:13 10k man in 2010 and Riddell a sub 15 5k man, given the nature of the course this was looking like one hell of a run from Brooks.  Surely he would fade over the next lap? 

The gap did come down over the third lap but only slightly, and then on the fourth it seemed to stay the same.  Coming up the final hill I made one huge last effort and reckon I got the gap down to 5 seconds but Brooks really was strong today and came off the top of the hill and pushed on so well he almost caught Hardman for 2^nd.  If I felt tired early on, the final hill had really finished me off and I was glad to see the finish line. 

Both myself and Jones ran with Garmin GPS watches and the race was a few metres short of 7 miles.  My average pace came up as 5:54 per mile and Jones 5:44 which reflects just how hard this course is.  If nothing else it was a superb training run over a testing course!

If I can be within a minute of Andi Jones at the Northerns I know I will get a decent finishing position.