National Road Relays, Sutton park

In the words of Miranda's mum - "such fun"!!  It's three years since I've run in a road relay for my club, Leamington C&AC, and it was great to experience the team spirit that relays seem to bring out.  Apparently, or so I'm told by some of the club coaches, when I run in a club team some of the other athletes seem to find a little bit extra!!  I don't know whether this is true, but it definitely works both ways as I, too, am motivated to do as well as I possibly can for the team.  As I don't train at the track very often I sometimes feel a bit 'out of touch' with the others in the club, so Saturday was a great opportunity to catch up with some of the 'older' members who I've known for years but don't see very often, and also to meet some of the newer members.

I think the weather also added to the enjoyment of the day.  Who couldn't feel uplifted by running in the gorgeous sunshine that bathed Sutton Park, among the vibrant autumn colours glowing against a bright blue sky?

Anyway, back to the race.  I was on second leg, and because it's a while since I've done the relays I was really worried that I would miss our first leg runner coming in and let the whole team down!!  It actually turned out fine - I spotted Monica with no problem and was duly sent on my way by the marshal at the start.  My aim was just to race as hard as I could, to try and gain as many places as I could and, hopefully, to not let anyone pass me.  I was a bit apprehensive beforehand about the length of the race - given that it's so much shorter than I'm used to these days and I'd hardly done any speed work in training!  Once I got running, though, it was a great feeling just to be able to run as hard as I could without worrying about the watch, splits, pace etc. - purely racing for the team.

At first I was counting the number of people I passed, but soon lost count so just concentrated on picking people off one by one.  I guessed I'd passed about 12 runners; in actual fact I passed 27, taking the team from 51^st to 24^th position!  Luckily no-one passed me.  My time of 15.27 was 10^th fastest out of the 83 runners on my leg, and was only 14 seconds slower than when I last ran there in 2008 - not bad considering my lack of race-specific training!  Thanks to great efforts by the rest of the team - Monica, Faye and Rachel - we finished an excellent 38^th overall out of the 72 complete teams to finish.

Well done team!  Hope to see you at a few cross-countries over the winter.