On Sunday the 9th September, Sheffield hosted the first Great Yorkshire Run..and I took part..yey! Tom and I travelled over to Sheffield to my parents house on the Saturday (via Decathlon-the best shop in the world, to buy a few things for my trek, sleeping bag, another fleece, t-shirts etc.) That reminds me, I haven't tried out my sleeping bag yet! Anyway...possibly not the best thing to be doing the night before a run, but as it was my friend Laura's Birthday (Hi Laura if you're reading!) we went out in Sheffield in the evening after zooming to my parents house for the fastest bbq in the history of bbq's (possibly with the exception of those taking place in the antarctic). A great night was had by all at Laura (and Eleni's!) party and despite the late night and consumption of alcohol, we managed to drag ourselves up to get to Sheffield for the run.
We all (my parents, Tom and I) met Madeleine (who had first told me about the run) and we proceeded to warm up with the Mr Motivator style dude who was up on a platform busting some moves. As always with this sort of event, the atmosphere was great and very touching. Apparently there were some famous people there running...but I only read that after the event! The Elite athletes taking part were amazing, we saw them on their return journey as we were heading out, they were running about twice our speed and looking completely composed and quite comfortable!
Our aim was to run the 10km in under an hour, which we both did...yey! We set out timing our kilometers to make sure that we were under 6 minutes/km and celebrating each time we reached a km marker! It was great that although the route took us quite a bit away from the start and therefore our supporters (yes ok there were only 3!) couldn't really see us en route, that there were people along the way clapping us and children running alongside us at some points! Also, what I thought was a great idea, there were bands at several points along the way playing different types of music. This was lovely to hear and helped me to stay motivated too :-) At the 5km mark Madeleine and I seperated and ran our own races...not as fun running alone, but I did speak to a few interesting people along the way! We were both looking forward to a certain point along the route, where we had seen a car wash style "thing" set up, which we could run through to cool down in the fine spray. This was at about 7km I think, so very welcoming!
I made it back in 54.02 (1370 th position) and Madeleine was right on my heels with a time of 56.31 in 1672 nd position. There were 4 and a half thousand people there on the day so this wasn't bad at all! I am aiming for sub 50mins next time though :-) as is Madeleine I would imagine!
Anyway, I am well and truly hooked to these events so looking for the next one now!
No comments:
Post a Comment