Starting as I mean to go on?... I hope not!

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 10^th 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 10^th 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 9^th 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!