2014 all started with a big bang; unfortunately, I was not
where I should have been when the said bang went off. Confused? So was I!
Confused as to how I managed to miss the start of my first race of the year at one of the most important races I’ve ever competed in. I was donning the Devon
vest and representing my county at cross country for the first time, lining up
(or, in my case, not lining up) alongside the most competitive field of runners
I have yet to come up against. This was the South West Inter-Counties Cross
Country Championships, this year held at Killerton House, home of the weekly
Parkrun I attend, and it was the most inopportune occasion to fluff up my
pre-race preparations, let alone miss the start of the race completely.
The irony was that we had got to the venue with 3 hours to
spare before the scheduled start time of my race to ensure that we could get
one of the limited parking spots on site. We had sat in the cafe for over an
hour to kill time, had a leisurely coffee, I’d registered and had the time to
buy and screw in a new set of 12 inch spikes at the mobile kit store, as I
realised that my 9 inch ones were woefully inadequate for the depth of mud on
the course following weeks of heavy rainfall. I can’t quite put my finger on
how things then seemed to unravel before my eyes, like I had no control over
them.
As anyone who knows me will testify, I am meticulous with my
pre-race preparations and timings and I always allow ample time to warm up, go
to the toilet and get to the start line with 10 minutes to spare. Today,
despite being at Killerton so early, I suddenly found myself in a last minute
rush to get back from walking the course, go to the toilet (there was a queue –
isn’t there always?), do an initial warm up jog in my normal trainers, then
remove my leggings, put on my spikes, and head out to do some higher intensity
drills and strides. I knew, as I was heading back from walking the course, that
I only had 30 minutes to the start of our race, but now, suddenly, I was acting
as if I had all the time in the world to complete my usual warm up routine. The
big mistake I made was putting my Garmin on to measure my warm up as this
prevented me from seeing the actual time ticking by. I wanted to check out the
finish approach, to make sure I knew where to start pushing from, and so I
jogged over to the far side of the course. All the men were still running; they
had allocated them just 30 minutes to complete their hilly 9km course: a gross
under-estimation of how long it would actually take them in these tough, muddy
conditions. I got to the finish gazebo, with my hoodie, coat, hat and gloves
still on, not having even started my structured warm-up routines yet, to ask
Gordon, my coach, when he thought our race would start. For the first time I
looked down at the time on my watch and saw that it was 1:40pm: exactly the
scheduled start time of our race. Yet I still wasn’t overly worried as I
believed that our race couldn’t possibly start whilst all the men were still
out running on the same course. How wrong I was! At this point, Gordon glanced
over to the start line, 100m away, and saw that all the senior women were lined
up and under starter’s orders. Abject panic set in at that moment; this was the
stuff of my nightmares: seeing the backs of the runners tearing off into the
distance, whilst I am left staring after them, aghast and dumbfounded.
The start line... minus me. I am off stage right, frantically doing a strip tease.
I began stripping off my layers and, of course, the zip of my
jacket just had to get caught in the lining, so I yanked it up over my head,
along with my hoodie and hat. Gordon was telling me not to panic and I was just
praying that they would be held on the start line long enough to allow me to
hot foot it over there.
BANG!
The starting gun sounded and they were off. I was still in
the finish gazebo, 100 meters away. Bugger. I started to sprint over to the
course and had to hurdle a fence to get onto it. By now I was 50 meters adrift
of the last runners and about 100 meters down on the leaders. In almost any
other race, this wouldn’t be a problem; I would have ample time to make up lost
ground. The thing with cross-country is that it’s so fast and furious from the
gun, and the distance run is so short (just 5.6km for the women), that even a
10 meter gap can be impossible to make up, particularly against such talented
competition. I started to make my way through the field, cursing and telling my
club mates as I passed them that I’d missed the start (I felt the need to vent
my frustrations!). I then realised that I hadn’t even had my asthma inhaler
either: I really had ballsed this all up, good and proper!
The danger in these situations is that the adrenaline starts
coursing through your veins and so you head off like a raving banshee, trying
to make up the lost ground as quickly as possible. As I drew level with my
highly experienced club mate, Cathy, she tried to tell me not to panic, to slow
down and catch up gradually, but her advice came out in breathless gusts as I
tore on past like a thing possessed, and so her sage words of wisdom were lost, cast adrift to the wind, as I tore on past.
I felt amazingly strong for the first two laps of the bottom
field; a combination of being fresh, charged with adrenaline, and with this
part of the course being flat. I surprised myself by how quickly I managed to
claw my way through the field and get in touch with the front runners. The top
3 or 4 had an insurmountable gap on me, but I was almost back in contact with
the next handful as we hit the first hill. This is when I started to pay the
price for my speedy opening surge. There’s nothing quite like a hill to find
you out and I found out pretty sharpish that the lactic had built up and my
legs now felt like lead. I maintained my position up the hill but as soon as we
started down the other side my team mate, Cathy, used her superior descending
skills to the max and coasted past me. The gap she opened up proved too much
for me to close on the next uphill section and so I found myself digging in deep
to defend my place from a Wells City athlete who was hot on my tail.
Unfortunately for her, she seemed to be struggling for grip in the muddy
sections and, as we started down the last hill, which had by now been well and
truly churned up by all the runners in the 7 races that preceded ours, she took
a tumble. I narrowly avoided being taken down by her, having to do a nimble
swerve and jump manoeuvre to avoid tripping over her. I felt awful just
powering on and leaving her there; my matronly instinct was to stop, make sure
she was ok and help her up, but then I remembered that this is cross-country
and falls are just par for the course. Plus there were plenty of spectators on
hand to step in, so I pressed on for home, feeling grateful that I had invested
in those 12 inch spikes. In the final half kilometre, I got my second wind and
was starting to gain ground on Cathy and a bunch of 3 other runners that all
finished within 4 seconds of each other, but I ran out of room to actually
catch them, eventually finishing 1 place and 5 seconds behind Cathy in 10th
place.
Trying to hang onto Cathy and a Wiltshire athlete on the last descent.
The final push for the finish line, caked in mud!
Before the start of the race, if you’d asked me if I would
have been happy with a top 10 finish, I’d have said yes, of course! These are
the South-West championships, where the best runners from 6 different counties
assemble to battle it out in the Devonshire mud for individual and county
glory; but I wasn’t satisfied. I came 10th despite missing the start
and having 100 meters of ground to make up, despite not having warmed up
properly and despite not having had my inhaler. In spite of all of this, I felt
strong, and so I was left thinking what might have been had I not been a
complete and utter idiot and had I started the race properly, on time,
alongside everyone else.
Really I am just kicking myself. I feel embarrassed,
humiliated, frustrated, infuriated and I have nobody to blame for this but
myself. All the other 80 women managed to get themselves to that start line on
time, so why couldn’t I? In all honesty, I thought of myself as being above doing
something ditzy like this and it is the kind of stupidity that I would heartily
mock and deride if another athlete did it. I can try to explain it by it being
my first event of this kind, on this scale, and so I made a rookie error,
except that there were other women in that field for whom it was also a new
experience and they still managed to haul their backsides to the start line on
time. Really, there’s no excuse for it at all: I was just plain stupid.
Simples.
One thing is for sure, I have learned a valuable lesson the
hard way: these events start on time, to the minute, regardless of whether the
athletes in the race before have finished running or not. The one consolation
is that I was still the third counter of six in the Devon team and that, miraculously,
I gained a silver medal in the senior ladies race as only one athlete in this
age group finished ahead of me. As usual, the vet 35s were very strong but I
must give a special mention to my club mate, Cathy Newman, who had a
sensational race to finish in 9th place overall, as a vet 50
athlete, and so beating all the vet 40s and 45s and a vast proportion of
runners who are less than half her age. The woman’s amazing – we are privileged
to have her in the club!
So 2014 has started eventfully. It has not started as I mean for it to go on in terms of making idiotic timing errors in races, but it has started well in the sense that I am feeling fit, running well and am on top of my achillies injury. I look forward to being able to redeem myself in the eyes of the Devon team manager on another occasion... if she ever takes the risk of selecting such a loose cannon again!
