School Cross Country 2014

Today I raced my annual school cross-country. This first race is the start of the cross-country season and well I only decided to actually race cross-country this season on Monday. It took some hard thinking and a little bit of persuasion from my coach Jill and some other members of our running group. Anyway…I turned up at the track today way too early so I decided to walk it to see how it looked and determine how muddy it was, this gave me to opportunity to decide what shoes I would run in. I noticed that just by walking the course my hip was already sore, this automatically gave me a negative feeling before I had even started the race. I knew by then I need to have a good warm up to loosen off my hip and hope that it didn't give me too much grief during the race. I also knew that I definitely wasn't ‘running fit’ meaning I was nowhere near the fitness I need to be to run a good race. This was somewhat demoralizing and because of this I knew I had a fault line in my preparation and this meant that I could be beaten. I didn't like this feeling and I knew that I would have to work extra hard if I wanted to cross that line in first place. My plan that I had established was to go out hard and hang on, this is one that I acquired from ultra-athlete Mike Le-Roux.

I stepped up to the line and by the time this came, my heart felt like it was in my mouth. As the gun sounded I sprinted as hard as I could, still going by the saying, go out hard and hang on. I worked myself to a relatively good lead where I felt comfortable with the distance I had made. By this time my arms were filled with lactic acid, to point where I didn't have any feeling and I had to shake my arms to try and pump some blood into them. The lactic acid that I had created forced me to slow down dramatically to the point where I was now running at a jog. I had enough distance on the other runners to hang on until the end. I finished the 2.7km course in 9:51:17. I think that this was a pretty good effort considering the lack of training that I have been doing for running.

Since my decision to keep running throughout this year I have also come to the decision to also focus on triathlons as well as my cycling because I thought that if I do put so much effort into the two sports riding and running, why not put the same amount of effort for the last one, swimming. I still have my main goal of cycling, where I am hoping to go down south this year for the State Road Race, but I will continue to race triathlon throughout this year with the intentions of hopefully making the QLD team next year. I am also going to spend a lot of time running because my coach thinks that I will be able to do really well at State Cross-Country this year so I thought why not give it one last crack. Depending on how well I do there, will determine whether or not I travel to Brisbane later in the year for State Athletics.