Matt Gets Running

So, hav­ing checked I’d got everything about three times, I set off this morn­ing to walk down to the start of the Bris­tol 10K. Everything was very civ­il­ised and well-organised. I got a pre­view of what was to come by walk­ing in through what would become the “handouts at the fin­ish” sec­tion, where they were already stack­ing up space blankets, lay­ing out trays of water bottles, and build­ing the T-shirt racks.

The race “vil­lage” was centred on Mil­len­nium Square, which gradu­ally filled up with a huge crowd of what turned out to be more than 10,000 run­ners. And that’s a lot of Deep Heat fumes, believe me. Every­one seemed friendly, the queues to drop bags off were nice and short, and I soon found a few people from work who were run­ning, too.

Bump­ing into my col­leagues pretty much set the whole race up. I formed up into the big queue for the slower starters — the race got going in a couple of con­sec­ut­ive streams — along­side some of them, includ­ing my friend and erstwhile boss Mike. As we filed toward the start, first shuff­ling, then walk­ing, then at a slightly unsure, crowded jog, we stayed together. We agreed we’d go at our own pace, and if it felt like we needed to fire our iPods up and blast on ahead, or slow down and walk for a bit, that was fine, and we’d split up guilt-free and maybe meet at the end.

But, as it turned out, Mike and I run at pretty much the same pace. My carefully-selected iTunes playl­ist fell by the way­side because I never felt the need for music. We just jogged along, nat­ter­ing occa­sion­ally, keep­ing each other com­pany while enjoy­ing the unusual exper­i­ence of hav­ing ran­dom people cheer us on every now and again.

The race headed out of Bris­tol along the A4 Port­way, under the Sus­pen­sion Bridge, turn­ing back towards the city centre again at the 4K marker. On the return leg, I heard my friend Tara cheer­ing me along, which was fab I was feel­ing fine; the weather was pretty much per­fect for run­ning, cool and over­cast, but not too cold, and with no rain. And it was fant­astic to run along the A4 without any traffic to get in the way, or any fumes to spoil the Avon Gorge air.

We struggled up the short and sharp uphill sec­tion of fly­over to cross over the water and come down on the south side of the water, to com­plete the loop around the entire har­bour and back to the fin­ish line. This was the bit where things star­ted feel­ing a little harder. Cum­ber­land Road, that runs in a straight line along the south side of the har­bour and the north side of the river, is a long road with a slight incline, and the main thing that kept us going was the encour­age­ment from small pock­ets of cheer­ing people, and passing the 7 and 8K mark­ers. That was def­in­itely the bit where we just con­cen­trated on put­ting one foot in front of the other and not much else.

Once we got closer to the city centre again though, things got easier. The roads were lined with people, lots of sup­port and cheer­ing, ban­ners, kids, people shout­ing out to friends they were wait­ing for — it was a proper wel­come. We crossed over Prince Street Bridge — again, nice being able to do that without wor­ry­ing about traffic — and passed the 9K marker just as we hit the Centre. Lots of music and cheer­ing by this point, and we just kept on going.

Com­ing up to the end, Mike said to me, “Sprint fin­ish!” and upped the pace. I’d not even thought about that; I was in a bit of a steady-pace trance, but I fol­lowed his lead and we crossed the line together!

On the whole, it was def­in­itely a much more soci­able exper­i­ence than my nor­mal long-distance runs. Not that I seem to be affected too much by the “loneli­ness of the long-distance run­ner”, but run­ning with 10,000 other people, and one run­ning part­ner in par­tic­u­lar def­in­itely felt pretty good.

It also seemed to do good things for my pace. The offi­cial times aren’t in yet, or at least not for the slow people like me. The front run­ner, Kenyan Gor­don Mugi, man­aged it in a smidge under twenty eight and a half minutes, which seems almost incon­ceiv­ably fast to me. But look­ing at my Run­Keeper log, which seems pretty accur­ate, I think Mike and I man­aged to get through in around one hour and ten minutes, pretty much dead-on seven minutes per kilo­metre pace, which is a lot quicker than I nor­mally man­age on my dis­tance runs.

But, frankly, if I’d taken an hour and a half I’d still have been happy: I’ve done my first race. I’ve been there, and got the t-shirt, lit­er­ally. And a medal. And race-pack with some good­ies. And Jess, Mike’s wife, took us both up to Roco­til­los on the Tri­angle to treat us to some extra-large, extra-thick milk­shakes, which were bloody fant­astic, and prob­ably replaced every single cal­orie we’d just lost…

So, that’s my race report — I hon­estly can’t think of a single way it could have gone bet­ter. Looks like I’ve smacked through my char­ity tar­get, too, with £275 raised on my Just Giv­ing page, and some­where between £50 and £100 to col­lect from the paper spon­sor­ship form I’ve been hawk­ing around work. That and the fact that my com­pany is going to match the first £250 should see me hit some­where around the £600 mark for St. Peter’s Hos­pice, which is ace.

Right. Think I’m going to have a nice bath to see if I can min­im­ise any aches and pains for tomor­row. And pack my medal in my bag for the morn­ing. Not, of course, that I want to show off. No, of course not. I just need to prove that I ran the race so I can col­lect the spon­sor­ship money. And the best way of doing that is to take the medal into work. No show­ing off involved. Really. Ahem.