Wednesday, 31st March – 25 days to go

Rest day. Follow up a couple of threads of conversation we had in Caldos after Saturday parkrun.

We were considering how well VARR had done in the PECO cross country league and how we’d probably had fewer runners than most of the other teams. With apologies to Sam I thought I’d have a quick skeg at the stats.

In total, 192 ladies ran including 16 from VARR. Hamsa and Kay were ever present. Only 23 ladies ran all five races. Abbey (28) and Horsforth (25) had the highest number of runners. In total, 300 men ran from 17 different clubs. Ten clubs had 16 or more male runners. VARR had 13 male runners of whom Dave, Tom, Paul, Russ & Rick were ever present. I guess a core of regulars is the essence of a successful campaign. Ilkley Harriers had the most male runners with 36. Of course, the vital stat that I’m missing is the number of club members for each club. Don’t think that’s published. I get the impression that almost all the VARR members ran except those with Sunday commitments, but I don’t really know.

Liz was speculating how fast might I have been if I’d run when younger. I’m not one for thinking about what might have been, so I’m happy to have only taken up running later in life. If I was a similar age grading at 21 then I would have been looking at 5km of 16:27 and 10k of 34:15. As I was pretty wasted for almost all of my 21st year I can confidently say I wouldn’t have even considered running those distances, let alone at speedy times. I’d much rather speculate on how fast I can do this darned marathon.

Caught up on last week’s and this week’s Marathon Talk today. Seems like letting your mind wander isn’t a bad thing and can be helpful, so I’ll not feel guilty about doing that. Bit confused on the contradiction of pacing. If you can run to a set pace then you will get a set time; no surprises, but a great deal of satisfaction. If you set off like a lunatic you may (a) blow up and under-perform or (b) amaze yourself with an unexpected fast time. As this is my first marathon I’m duty bound to run to a set pace and hope I can maintain it throughout the run. I know I can’t set off too slowly just to achieve a negative split, but if I can achieve consistent splits that would help me to run a good time.