March Blog
This month has so far been the best in terms of consistency in training this year, as I have finally been able to get some solid running , and some competitions in my legs. To start off on 19th March I raced at the English Schools Cross Country in Kent ,which was my second cross country race of the season. As I have mentioned in my previous blog ,I've suffered from a knee injury over the majority of the winter therefore it was great to finally see how my form was coming along especially after all the track sessions I have been doing recently .The race was a 7.4 km run in which in which i was placed 5th in the pen out of 8 for my County. I sadly didn't have the greatest of qualifying races I had only done a month of light jogging therefore wasn’t at my best. The start of the race was extremely chaotic having around 200 metres of straight running, and then into a 90 degree left hand bend ,which as you can imagine, had many people pushing and tripping over . I luckily managed to evade the majority of the chaos ,and in the first 2 km slowly worked my way up from the back to 40th place . For the majority of the race I held the position however around a 1 km to go ,a pack of around 6 runner managed to overtake me. I stayed with them until the line and managed to overtake the majority in the sprint to the end, therefore finishing me in 43rd place. Overall I am really happy with my performance as its the best I have ever achieved a year young in a national cross country race ,especially considering my knee injury problems.
The next race of this month was Good wood Duathlon . It was a really nice day, and the course was around a race track therefore it was really fast and smooth for the bike. The distances were as follows 3.8 km run into a 22.8km bike and then into a 3.8 km run. I turned up slightly late therefore it was quite chaotic to get into transition and do a warm up. A definite lesson for the future to turn up to races early! The race started with a mass start , in which i manged to get into a nice relaxed rhythm at the front , due to it not being of a national standard and was more of a local race. I led the run comfortably and went into transition with around a 15-20 second lead. The bike also went well, there were already the long distance athletes on the course as they started around 10 minutes beforehand therefore I had many people to chase down ( it wasn’t however a draft legal ). The last run also felt pretty strong and i came into the finish with a time of 59 minutes with a relatively comfortable lead of around a minute and a half over the next competitor.
This oncoming weekend I’ve got my first triathlon national race of the season at the performance assessments in Nottingham ,which is slightly odd as it's held over 2 days, in which the first day is a 400 metre TT swim in a pool (the remainder of the national races are open water) and the second day is a 10 km bike onto a 2.5K run. Sadly the bike is gear restricted to a roll out of 6.93m which is a bit frustrating as I think it disadvantages the stronger bikers as you can’t really reach above 42 kph without completely spinning out, however the rules are the rules and there isn’t anything I can really do about it. Overall I am going into it with an open mind and not really going to put any pressure on myself as I know I am a better open water swimmer than a pool swimmer, and my main early race of the season will be at Llanelli in May which is the Euro qualifier. I think I am as prepared as I can be in my current situation,therefore am excited to see how i perform and am looking forward to the weekend .
