I know I said that after the Greenwich Park palaver I said I wasn’t going to go to any TRO events ever again, but I really wanted to do a 10k race today and this was the only sensible/local option. The map looked a lot simpler than Greenwich and I had a discount code.
I am pleased to say it all went off without a hitch – I didn’t get lost once. Looking on Strava, my first lap is a tiny bit different from the second but I am not sure if this was deliberate – the overall distance looks right.
After the calamities of the previous few races, there wasn’t a lot to say about this. The weather was unseasonably mild for February, with a lot of sun and a maximum temperature of SEVENTEEN degrees. This was quite welcome after the baltic conditions last week. I wore my sunglasses. I didn’t do anything silly like setting off too fast or grinding to a walk, although on the second lap the general public had got out of bed and were set on making a nuisance of themselves. I just don’t get what makes people think “Oh look, there’s a race going on. I’ll walk down the exact path it’s happening on, even though this is a massive park with 59 other paths, and perhaps I will get my entire family to stand in the middle of the path and look at the sky”. I reckon I can knock at least a minute off my time in compensation for wasted breath yelling EXCUSE ME at people and dodging people who either didn’t understand English or just didn’t fancy getting out of the way.
My time! 1:16:14, which is pleasing if not amazing. Definite progress in the right direction, although of course the Garmin does not think so. (It is starting to remind me of my ex boyfriend. Nothing I do has any effect. It seemed easy to please when I got it but now I can’t do anything right. Next step will be for it to refuse to switch on before lunchtime and for it to start recording other people’s runs behind my back and gloating about how everyone else’s running is better.)
The weather was so nice afterwards that Rob (who I forgot to mention yesterday now has pink unicorn tape on his bad knee) and I decided to go and sit outside in the sun and pretend it was summer. The Serpentine Gallery charged me THREE POUNDS FIFTY for a lousy Coke. Within fifteen minutes I was absolutely freezing and could not pretend that it was summer any longer. I went home.
7:07 