Fairlands Relays

Relays! These are fun, as long as you don't have to organise anything about them.

As I've said in the past, this is the kind of event where the team captains have a lot of work to do - picking the best teams possible, of course, but there's all the stress about wondering who is actually going to turn up (whether they've said they will or not), registering the teams, choosing their running order, giving out the numbers, taking the entrance fees... So since I've had to do that for the last three years, it was very refreshing just to be able to turn up and run!

All the organisation was done by men's captain Sibbo and stand-in ladies' captain Karen (since Melissa was unavailable), and they did a good job of it. I was sent out on the first leg, which was a new experience for me - it's the one part of the race that doesn't feel like a relay at all. It's also a bit tricky at the start, with all the teams negotiating a couple of tight turns in a crowd (that'll be my excuse for losing a few seconds... James!). And with the legs only 3km in length, it's more like one rep of a training session than a race in itself... and least compared to our normal race distances.

So it was actually quite fun to go again. One team was incomplete, so Karen asked Lindsay and me if we'd like to finish it off. So after a little spectating to see how everyone else was doing (very difficult if you haven't kept track of who is in which team), I took over from Karen to run the D leg of team 111. This was more fun than the first time round - there were people to catch! (No more shall be said about the child who overtook me halfway round...) And surprisingly, I only ran about 20 seconds slower the second time than the first... at least, that's what my watch said. Unfortunately when I looked at the official results our team was labelled as Royston and had most of the leg times unrecorded. I passed the imaginary baton on to Lindsay, who finished her second leg of the night.

What I used to beat myself up over when I was choosing the teams, apart from considerations such as entering county teams or vet teams, was if I'd picked the right people. Since most of our fastest runners were unavailable, it was 'simply' a matter of Sibbo picking the 5 fastest men for the A team - and with me, Pete Scrowther, James Atkins, Tim Street and recently-returned-from-injury Nick Beresford, this was almost the perfect choice - only Pete Northover and Ollie Saville would have improved our time by only about 20 seconds. Paula, Jane and Tash were our speedy ladies who finished 4th - although my sloppy spectating thought they were 2nd. But then I thought the person Tash was having a sprint finish with was a little girl, and therefore a direct competitor, rather than a little boy with long blonde hair (another child - grrr). I think I'll stick to the competing rather than the spectating.