If I could give just one piece of advice to anyone running in an event, regardless of ability or distance, it would be to scout the course beforehand, assuming it isn’t too inconvenient to do so. If nothing else, knowing how to get to the course and how long that will take you will be one less thing to worry about on the day, but there is so much more you can discover by looking at the course. What is the surface like, and which type of shoes will be best suited to that? What is the terrain like?How long are the straights and how tight are the bends? If these factors aren’t a surprise then it will be a lot easier to execute the race the way you want, and so hopefully should help you enjoy it.
Walking around Clapham Common on Friday was very useful. I found out that the course was pretty much flat. There were a few little ups and down, but nothing long enough or steep enough to really test the legs. The quality of the pavements was very good, and the grass and dirt paths were dry, which meant they should behave predictably. There were also a few off-road trails to contend with too, but again, these were fairly short. My plan would be to take no chances on those sections and make the time back up on the paved straights. The biggest challenge would be the regular tight corners. Plenty of them were too tight to take flat out, which would mean slowing down and then accelerating out of the corners. Any acceleration will drain your energy, so I knew that this would make the course tough. And the final thing I noticed was that the paths were very narrow in a lot of places.
In some events, this isn’t really a problem. All you need to do is get out quickly and then find your own pace once the gaps start to open up. Unfortunately that wouldn’t be possible today, because as well as the 15k, there were 5k and 10k events (plus a 2k event for kids, though that had finished before the other events started). And because in theory the 15k runners would be going at the slowest pace, the 5k runners started first, followed by the 10k runners 2 minutes later, followed by us 2 minutes after that.
I decided that I shouldn’t worry too much about my time, as I would inevitably be slowed down by overtaking the slow runners in the 5k and 10k events. Instead, my goal was to achieve the best place possible, and so I set off with in a group of 5 at the front and stuck with them for most of the first kilometre. That was probably a mistake, as I went through the 1st and 2nd kilometre markers with splits of 3.39 and 3.49. For a 10k that might have been fine, but it felt too fast today, and I dropped back to a pace slightly outside 4 minutes per kilometre for the rest of the race. Even though a few people slowly overtook me over the next few kilometres, it felt like the right pace.
Everything went pretty much to plan, but when I crossed the finish line I wasn’t sure of my place. Agonisingly, I matched my place from the Richmond Park 10k, finishing 11th in a time of 1 hour and 55 seconds. Getting so close to a sub 1 hour run and a top 10 finish yet missing out on both was a pretty frustrating feeling. However, what was a decent consolation was the fact that my goal for this Summer was never to finish in the top 10 of a race, nor was it to go under the hour for 15k. My goals were to improve my 10k P.B. to under 40 minutes, which I have already achieved, and then smash my Half Marathon P.B. at Windsor next month.
This run was very useful preparation for that event. In terms of my pacing, an average pace of 4.00 min/km to 4.10 min/km should be something I can sustain over 21.1km (assuming the course is as fast as the organisers say it is). That would give me a time of between 1 hour 24 to 1 hour 28. Anything in that zone would be at least 10 minutes slashed from my unofficial P.B., so I’d be very happy with that. I know I need to do a bit more stamina work before then, and also cut out the cheat days from my diet, which have become a little too frequent recently. If I can be disciplined there and put in the hard yards in training, Windsor should be an event to enjoy and round off a good Summer of running in style.
Scorpo Stories 