A great nights sleep, woken briefly by Paul at 3 or 4am getting ready for his 5am start! Ours was a relatively leisurely 9am start so I got a bit of a sleep in which was nice. Breakfast, registration, chat with a few people on a wander down to the reservoir:
It was shaping up to be an excellent day for racing, sunny but still cool, just warm enough for a vest! After a fairly brief briefing, we were off. I had 2 goals for the race - 1) to average under 8 minutes/mile and 2) to get onto the podium. With that in mind, I figured I had to keep the 2 guys in front close. One of them turned out be just be an excitable starter and dropped off fairly quickly, the other (Ben Matthews) I would run with for quite some time. The first few miles were on forestry track/well maintained footpaths, and very easy running. I was thinking, if this keeps up it's not going to be much fun, I'm not used to running flat stuff!
It soon changed a little, with some nice singletrack, and I soon put a little distance on Ben. It was soon over though, then back onto forestry track. Ben soon caught me up again, and we ran together until checkpoint 1, 10 miles on or so, where we already had 7 or 8 minutes on 2nd.
Ben was slightly faster than me out of the CP, then continued to pull away slowly, but managed to take a wrong turn, then we were back together again, neither of us letting the other out of sight. I knew there was a big (relatively) climb coming up, so I pushed hard to try and drop him. Which didn't happen, he stayed hard on my heels. There was a good descent over uneven ground down to CP 2 at the dam, and I managed to put a bit of time on him there, but we were level again by the time we left.
Running across the dam was horrible, the air was thick with small flying insects, really gross. Ben left me soon after that (turns out he's a pretty good marathoner) as the terrain suited him - back to well maintained, smooth undulating path. I ran on, maintaining as good a pace as I could, coming in 2nd in 4:04 to Ben's 3:54, 3rd was John Croft in 4:19.
Tracey Dean managed to prove fitness, and bag 1st Female.
Was pleased with how I ran, although I do need to improve my long-distance stamina. I'm ok with races where I get a walking break up hill, not so much with constant fast(ish) running!
Sadly didn't get any more photos as we beat the photographers around the course!
Thanks TORQ for fuelling my race!
