Flitwick 10k

Before I forget, I'd better write about last weekend's Flitwick 10k. Another local race that I'd never done before - well, not as a North Herts Road Runner, anyway. I actually have been there before, but that was in 1998 on a day trip from university with the orienteering club and I was pleased to get 39:48 on that day (a minute behind Norman Leslie, now I look at the results).

The course was different then. I remember it as undulating but still fairly fast (but it's amazing how often your memory misses out important features of an event). This year the hills came as a bit of a shock to me. Which is a bit annoying, because normally I do quite well on hills. I think the problem this year was that I was trying to get a PB, or more specifically under 36 minutes. I didn't manage it, getting 36:10 instead. So of course I'm trying to persuade myself that it was all the hills' fault. That or the 200m finish on grass. Anything other than myself, really. OK, I probably went too fast for the first 2km. Don't tell anyone.

The race seemed to be pretty well organised. The pre-race instructions included a map marking different car parks depending on which direction you were coming from, which was a good idea (except the one we were aiming at was chained up when we got there - it didn't matter in the end, because we parked in a school the other side of Tesco instead, and so we bought our lunch on the way back to the car afterwards). Our Standalone favourite luxury portaloos were there, taking the strain off the facilities in the hall. And in the hall were huge maps - road and satellite - of the course.

Plenty of marshals, although it didn't appear to be a particularly tough route to marshal, and a scenic enough route, if you could ignore running parallel to the M1 for a mile or two. And if the clouds hadn't been so low that you couldn't see more than half a field away.

So I got to the end - slightly too slow - and could start to concentrate on the other club members finishing. It was good to see John Franklin finish with no sign of his recent long-term injury, and Suzy back racing again. It was also impressive to see Rebecca Lancaster finish her first 10k, having hardly run even half the distance before.

Did we win anything? I want to try and add this section to the end of race reports, but at the moment the Flitwick 10k site is broken. There are conflicting reports: Derek Myall may have won a bronze medal in the county vets race... but last time I talked to him he thought he'd come 4th.