35 mins/54:21 (5 miles?)

There's no getting away from it - half past five is heinously early in the morning to be getting out of bed. But with having agreed to meet up with other runners at six, it had to be done. The rain was incessant.

And my eye went off. That put me in an outstanding mood.

As it turned out, there was only one other runner who turned up (we were following the five minute rule, a rule you follow rigorously when you're standing out in the rain), the assistant coach who organised this foolishness in the first place. We were expecting a couple of others, and they might have posted to say they couldn't come, but the PFit discussion board has been down the last couple of days so it's difficult to know.

Anyway, eye or not I bounded out of bed and quickly gobbled up a gel shot so that I would at least have some energy to run on. This is where the fact that it was raining helped - I might well have bagged it if the weather had been dry, but I knew that some rain on the face would help!

We ended up running up and down hills for rather longer than I had expected, but they were good hills not far from our house. The AC had run Helvetia last year, and told me that the worst hill in the race route was no more severe than one of the more manageable hills this morning, so I am a good deal less worried now than I was. The hills I habitually do will have been quite enough, I think. But if you're running Helvetia, you need to do some hill training!

I reckon we probably did of the order of five miles. It's hard to be sure because we were doing run/walk (the AC has some IT band issues) and because hills are always slow anyway. It was a fairly easy pace for me, but I think five miles is a good bet.

Nice run. I'm planning on doing it again next week.

Posted by Dunx at June 8, 2004 09:17 AM