To be honest, I was going to have to pull out of this. I’d spent the last two weeks with both a sore neck, and latterly, a cough and cold with a mild fever. Plus I hadn’t been out properly running for 3 weeks and had only done a little run two weeks earlier. I was disappointed, because I didn’t want to let this great opportunity to race Steve (husband!) go.
However, I spoke to the doctor on Wednesday and he said that so long as I didn’t have a fever, I would be good to race. My cough was still a bit dodgy but the doctor had listened to my chest and declared it clear. I ran up to the hairdresser (half a mile there) on Friday evening and didn’t seem to be suffering too much so I decided to go ahead with the race.
Steve, you have to remember here, has done ZERO training for this. In fact when he ran with me with the pushchair back in August and did 2.7 miles without stopping, that was the furthest he’d ever run in his life. Let alone the 6.22 miles of a 10K. He doesn’t *do* running. He doesn’t do any fitness activity in fact, short of carrying the children round lots and walking to the station and back. He eats healthily, although he does like the fat on meat and pork scratchings and the odd can of beer of an evening. Despite all this, he is an ideal weight with no extra fat and super strong. It is Unfair. He doesn’t even have proper running shoes so I lent him my old Nike Pegasus ones (we’re the same size) which may not even be right for his gait, but given his ability to deal with whatever I figured it wouldn’t matter.
Saturday morning dawned.. well, it didn’t really. It was raining so hard and the clouds were so black I don’t believe there was a dawn! All the weather reports were for vile storm conditions with huge gusting gale force winds and torrential rain. Which was what we could see out the window, along with thunder and lightening almost overhead. Plus, my temperature was slightly raised (by less than a degree) and I didn’t feel 100%. I made the decision then and there to not push it.
So we got ourselves dressed, and very wet en-route to the train station. We met up with Kim, a friend who had extremely kindly offered to look after the children for us whilst we ran. As the weather was so dreadful, she took them back to her place nearby. The run itself was taking place in Greenwich Park, one of the royal parks in London and also coincidentally near the start of the London Marathon. Greenwich Park has the Royal Observatory at the top, and the meridian line (GMT) runs through it. It also contains a very steep hill.. short, but steep.
I tried lightly jogging up the hill en-route to the start to try and determine if I should wear my new bright red tracksuit top or not. It was still raining at this point so I decided I would. We reached the top of the hill and the start line and met up with Jacqui, who I had done the London Peace Run with a few months ago.
Steve and Jacqui at the start ** Official photo (c) IES Photography
Click on any photo for the full-size version. Note: There are quite a few official race photos in this lot simply because I didn’t have Steve to take photos this time! All official photos are (c) IES Photography and marked as such.. I have purchased a license to use them in this context for personal use so please do not redistribute them although why you would want to outside this race report I have no idea!!
The whole point of the Movember 10K was to wear a moustache, on behalf of the Movember charity which supports prostate cancer (or more like unsupports it but you get what I mean!) And for those of us ladies who don’t have the ability to grow a moustache, we had to draw one on. So we did! Mine wasn’t very clear, a sort of ginger/purple affair after the ginger lip liner I’d brought along snapped and Jacqui lent me her purple liner!
Photo taken by Jacqui on my iPhone!
After queueing for the toilet, I noticed it was raining less. In fact, it was bright sunshine. And no gales. Completely random! So I made the decision to run without my tracksuit top on after all.
We left our bags at the baggage drop, and lined up at the start. And we were off!
Here’s the route. It was pretty complicated, and we needed to run up the steep hill three times, but there were no problems running it as there were plenty of people to follow!
We’d deliberately started near the back as we all knew none of us were likely to win that day. Within a few hundred yards Steve was not enjoying himself.
Shortly afterwards Jacqui dropped back a little, and Steve and me were left with a gorilla in a Mankini to stare at for the next 5K! However, before too long Steve settled down and said he actually felt quite comfortable running at this pace. Which was good, as it was a full minute a mile less than my normal running pace and I was not feeling good at all!
Feeling rough ** Official photo (c) IES Photography
We did the first mile in 10:28, but to me it felt more like I’d done it in 9:28. The first half of the course was two laps around the top bit, although there was a super steep hill not long after the start going up alongside Maze Hill. I did manage to run it at least. There were also water stations which was good. Steve discovered how you get cramp after you drink water. I discovered it’s not easy drinking out of cups either when running. My moustache started to fade!
Running together ** Official photo (c) IES Photography
The second mile was 10:12, a little faster. But then it was flat! I probably felt the best during this mile. The third mile I was starting to not feel great, and we did it in 10:37. Steve was staying with me because he’d never run this far before so he was wary of running out fast and then being exhausted so I was pacing him. At the 5K point I think my time was something dreadful like 32 minutes, the second slowest 5K I’d ever run even in training besides my first 5K.
The second half of the race was running around the bottom section of the park. The weather turned a bit and it started to rain. By mile 4 (10:22 thanks to the downhill!) I was starting to feel hot and I knew it wasn’t just sweat. The low grade fever I’d had earlier in the week was coming back. It was getting harder and harder to run. And then the winners ran past us in the opposite direction at quite some speed.. heh, I doubt I could sprint that fast!
Running is Serious Business ** Official photo (c) IES Photography
Mile 5 (11:38) had a massive hill to climb. And for the first time ever in a race, and for the first time in months, I walked. I made it halfway up, but I was already running at a 13 minute mile pace and so I figured I’d be better off walking at a 14 minute mile pace and conserve a lot more energy. Steve sprinted up to the top. I walked and felt like crap. Hence the slow time for that mile.
At the top of the hill, the route turned back on itself so we could run down the hill again and we passed Jacqui who wasn’t that far behind us at all! Once we were on the straight again, we were so thinned out by this point that regular park users kept wandering on the path. Some pretended to run alongside and were being patronising “Oh don’t do that and make them feel bad” – I can assure you I did not feel bad – I’d covered 8K by this point and was suffering from a fever so the fact I was keeping up with them, fresh, was hardly something to feel bad about.
Mile 6 (12:11) was horrendous and the slowest mile I’ve run, even with the pushchair, since August I think. Most of it was uphill. I’m afraid to say I walked most of the uphills. Steve sprinted up them and waited for me at the top. My fever was quite clearly there and if I hadn’t been near the end I’d have walked the rest of the way. I was feeling extremely rough indeed. And there was one final hill.
As you can see from the elevation of the course (click the photo to open full size in a new window), the hills were pretty steep. And the final hill came in at 9.5K! Yes, I walked half of it and yes Steve waited at the top again. He was very good – basically I’d told him that if he went off without me I’d probably (such the idiot that I am) try and catch him up and do myself more damage. Plus I was a bit worried in case I collapsed and I’d rather want him to be there if I did! And given he’d been alongside me for most of the race, we figured we might as well finish as we started.
So, top of the hill, 200m to go, we “sprinted” across the finish line together!
Our Extremely Twee Finish ** Official photo (c) IES Photography
Here’s the official result: (click to see full size in a new window, or click the link to the left to see “live” on the site)
Unfortunately for Steve, it appears I won but only because my number was less than his – our other two times (gun time, from when the gun was fired, and the chip time) were identical!
We picked up our medals, and our free razors and shaving gels and stuff(!) plus our free bananas, vitamin water and jelly babies. And Jacqui (who finished only 3 minutes behind us!) took another photo of us:
So.. brief interlude for some statistics!
Here’s the mile split times – appalling for me!
Yes, I finished in 67:26. My first ever 10K in training was 67:12. Heck, the second 5K was 35:26, slower than my first ever 5K in training which was 33:41.
A month ago, as part of an 8 mile run, I did 10K in 57:54. I was a whole TEN MINUTES slower this time. Look at the speed comparison (red was Movember, blue was the training run. Higher is faster)
Comparison against a 10k training run I did a few weeks earlier
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a low grade fever, a cough, no proper training for 3 weeks, and a sore neck will do for you.
Where did we finish? 520 and 521 out of 620 competitors. If I’d finished in my personal best time from a month ago, I’d have been around 320th or so.. and in an ideal world I’d have improved upon that with an extra month of training. We were beaten by tons of old people and people dressed in bad running gear and all sorts. Here’s the official results table.
Ultimately, Steve could have finished a lot faster and would have beaten me.. but he doesn’t know by how much as I held him back! And if I’d been in peak fitness, I may well have beaten him. We just don’t know. So we will need a rematch when I’m fitter for sure!
As for the race itself as a 10K? Very well organised, very friendly people and apart from finding it hard going, I couldn’t fault anything at all. The race organisers were the same people who did the Epsom 5K Dash where I finally broke 30 minutes for 5K a few months back, and the organisation had been great then as well. The layout of the course was good (got to be tough fitting 10K into Greenwich Park) and the marshalls were nearly all very supportive. The atmosphere was very friendly altogether in fact. So I will definitely look out for these race people in future – great work! The weather had been perfect when it mattered too, although nobody can take credit for that!
The story doesn’t quite end here. As we headed over to Kim’s house to pick up the children, I was feeling a bit odd. After we’d picked the children up, got changed and had a chat, we started walking to the DLR to get home. It started torrential rain and galing again, and this time the low grade fever came back with a vengeance. I was shaking violently and white as a sheet and had nowhere to sit down. We got on the train and I honestly thought I was going to collapse. We had to change trains at Greenwich and there isn’t much shelter on the platform there either. Fortunately the wait was only 7 minutes. After that instead of walking home from Woolwich station as I had planned, I caught the bus on my own and Steve walked back with the children.
I never did find out what my temperature got up to because I was so cold when I got in the reading wasn’t accurate and by the time I had warmed up, the ibuprofen had kicked in a little. Anyway, it read 38.5C at the highest but I am sure it felt far more like a 39.5C fever (103F and above) as I was feeling so absolutely horrible and shivering so violently. It felt like full on flu.
Anyway, the good news is that after some rest, a little bit of food and so on later that evening I felt a lot better and, touch wood, the fever has not returned. I think it was just my body saying “errr, what was all that about?” and warning me not to run when I wasn’t totally healthy. I will heed that lesson!
So, I probably won’t go out training for a bit until my cough is better and I am sure my fever has gone as I’m sure it won’t speed up my recovery. So no training again for a while. I am seriously worried if this sort of stuff happens early next year when I am doing my proper marathon training. I can’t afford to take a month off.. the training plan I have chosen requires 3-4 times a week for 18 weeks.
Hopefully I will feel better soon! Interestingly my muscles did not hurt today and they clearly had loads of strength left yesterday when I was going up hills – it was my heart and lungs that hated me.
You may be interested to hear that Steve had a slight blister from the Nike Pegasus shoes of mine he borrowed right where I had the blister. I knew those shoes made blisters!! Nowhere near as big as mine were from it though, and only over 5K. Typical!
