Race Report

Niamh got back to my reply for an expansion of "ah, sure, it was grand". I was tempted to edit out her little slip taking the wrong track - makes orienteer'ers look bad Enjoy!

And so to expand on my 'ah sure, it was grand' description of yesterday's hill race!

I was toying with the idea of running a hill-race for a while. The majority of my training has pretty much been on the flat, and if I'm running at the World Champs in Trondheim, I'm going to need to get up those hills. The 30th anniversary race seemed like a nice one to go for. Circuit training in the army gym at 8 the night before mightn't have been the best idea, but Saturday dawned bright and sunny and I decided to go for it. The race plan was simple... get up the hill as quickly as possible and be careful coming down.

From the off, it was a flurry of feet and fairy wings. Narrow track just after the start slows the pace. There's something slightly surreal about having a topless guy in a pink grass skirt running up a mountain ahead of you. Steady pace, up up up. Off the top of the 'boneshaker' and through by the masts, everything going ok. Running along the edge of the forest... hmmm... don't remember this on the map of the route. After about half a kilometer, no tapes for a while, I realise that we are on the lower track. Looking ahead and behind me, it's a stream of people all having missed the turn up to the right. Nothing in it but to keep going and cut up later. Luckily I didn't go too far down this parallel track, as happened a few of the leading group (they ended up descending and having to climb again, shudder!). Looking at my GPS route afterwards, we covered only about 150m extra. Hit the top of Two Rock and back down, along the marked route this time :-) Quick glance behind me. That was the training session - now just get back to the start with no injury. The descent was rocky in places, and I had to keep re-focussing instead of letting my thoughts wander. Two guys blasted past me about 700m from the finish, woah, no chance of staying with you two! Looking at the results this morning I realised that they were two of the leading bunch that had gone wrong, they had some descending speed. In to the finish and hurrah, safely back and to top it off, a nice boost by being first woman back. As it was the inter-club championships, and there were no other CNOC women running, I ran with Ros and Mirjam on the Trinity team and we pulled off a second place.

It was a spectacular day, sunny and bright, and IMRA had lovely 30th ballons along the route and food in the pub afterwards. Congrats to them on 30 years of existence, and hopefully many of the runners that were out yesterday will be there for the 60th anniversary race :-)

If anyone has any race reports/reports/comments/thoughts on anything CNOC related or our new website- email them on to me