Terena writes:
Sunday evening and just home from another brilliant trip to Brighton!
Some will remember, some will not, some may wish to forget, there used to be an annual Eagles trip to Brighton, which always included running the half marathon and it often included The Eagle Pub! In fact, it may even have been a club champs’ race, but I’m not 100% sure on that! Anyway … it fell out of favour one year (I won’t go into details!), but a few of us continued the tradition, and this was my 8th trip and 6th finishers medal! Covid did for one race and injury put pay to the 2022 race. But back to this year…
I don’t mind admitting that I am a reluctant lone runner but with London approaching (yes, I know there will be thousands of people there just not my people) I must face the reality that I will be running solo and Brighton turned out to be a good practice ground. Many of you won’t know that I can suffer from panic attacks and anxiety when I’m running solo in events, so I’ve got to put my big girl pants on and get on with it!
Two big differences in Brighton this year: my son, who is now studying at University of Sussex, joined us for our pre-race evening meal (which was super cool); and Kelli, David and I separated at mile 4 of the race! The norm would be we all start together but then typically David would take off and Kelli and I would pootle on together. It felt a timely occurrence that this year that I ran the last 9 miles solo.
It went well and I stuck to my marathon target pace all the way to 11.5 miles. The weather wasn’t too kind and there was a strong head wind on the turnaround, which meant a 3-mile fight with the elements. I can tell you it was not as much fun as the year the wind was behind us on the stretch back! At 11.5 miles I decided to push on a bit for a couple of reasons – it was cold and windy, and rain was on the cards, and secondly, I wanted to see how much I had left. I did well and picked my pace up from 10:50 /mi to around 9:15 /mi running past a good number of runners to finish strong crossing the line at around 8:40 /mi pace.
When I left you at the end of my last blog, I was looking forward to getting some miles done during daylight hours. Somehow or other, that never quite worked out - I ran precisely zero times during the day! I did get the training done though, and a little R&R to get the body battery recharged! The last couple of weeks have included track, S&C, and a little jaunt up West Walk. I know there are plenty of Eagles that do 10k, even half marathons on West Walk ... but I avoid hills whenever possible, so it was a little peculiar to be voluntarily running up it!
My long run the weekend prior to Brighton was tough – my S&C session had been moved to the Thursday and my long run moved forward a day to Saturday, so I was running on achy legs. I had 16 miles on the plan which turned into 14.25. Yes, I’m having the .25! It felt unbelievably hard, but it was only after that I realised these other two events played their part in this! Still, we managed to have a laugh as you can see from the photo!
Squashing houses!
The week leading up to Brighton half was a cut-back week, so I had only done track and S&C in the lead up which was well timed as I was beginning to feel a bit exhausted with the training on top of a busy time at work.
I’m still working on fuelling options, I didn’t quite nail it at Brighton as I took a Tailwind powder intending to use during the race forgetting that Brighton only have cups of water and not bottles! In that wind there was no pouring powder from one receptacle to another anyway! I’m sure I would have ended up looking like I had been involved in a narcotics and fan mishap! So, I just used my regular gels, and the Tailwind will have to wait for another day and another blog!
Have a great couple of weeks ahead, run happy and be safe!