European Cross Country

Post Liverpool I got some good training in so I thought I’d be going to Portugal in reasonable shape. I was at the back of the pen but that wasn’t an issue as I wanted to move through anyway.

So we set off and we had 3 little laps and 4 big laps to do. I set off feeling ok and was probably in the 40’s or 50’s after a few minutes running. I moved through on these little laps but to be honest I wasn’t feeling great. Once again the lactic hit me early on and I just felt rubbish. I think going into the big laps I managed to move through to not far off the top 20 but hitting that hill for the first time ruined me and things got worse from there. With 3 and a bit miles to go I felt awful and the last place I wanted to be was at the European cross. Again it was a case of slogging it to the finish and trying not to let too many people come by me. In the end I think I ended up around 25^th.

It was a shame because pre-race I thought I was going ok. Someone had told me though that when you get food poisoning it can affect you for quite a while so it may have still been playing with my body. I don’t know if that was what really happened or maybe I just wasn’t good enough on the day or maybe I wasn’t in as good shape as I thought. No matter what though it still didn’t help cheer me up after a very poor race. I wasn’t the only one in a huff though. The whole team were pretty much pissed off as we all thought we ran below par and we were very disappointed not to be in the team medals. The others, like myself, thought we had a medal winning team and one of the strongest teams Great Britain had sent. Overall, everything that could have possibly gone wrong pretty much did.