East Met CC

Felt pretty scratchy throughout Saturday - difficult week at work catching up I guess - and wasn't feeling particularly enthused about much at all, although the morning's acheivement (shared with the better half) was installing a wireless router and a wireless card into my battered old laptop, so there's one less cable about the place.

Turned up at Sydney Park in humid light rain at around 2 for the Randwick Botany 2.5/5/7.5km cross country event - regular readers may recall me running this event back in mid May. There was a 7.5km option, which is what I was in for.

Reasonable crowd of CRs around, although the fleet of kids from last month wasn't quite in evidence - I seem to recall some school athletics event on Friday.

After a gentle 2.47km warm up and some stretches, we lined up at the start. Got a positive note right off the bat when I managed to knock off the meat tray in the raffle.

We started, and I got through the first lap in 8:56, which was simply too fast. Hills started to hurt through the second lap, and I was still carrying some of the recovery into the flat, which is an issue at Sydney Park. Managed to back the pace up to run the second and third laps in a more sensible 9:22 and 9:23, but really felt it on the climbs on the last lap. Still, to put it in context, I ran 18:41 for the 5k last month, so to be at better pace over the longer distance is a good sign of progress. Had Vespa about 20-30 seconds up the road but wasn't able to make an impression, but she was only doing 5k, and I managed to hold off Richard, a fellow who introduced himself as the guy I'd dragged up the Argyle Cut late in the SMH Half - funny, I remembered it the other way around!

Jogged through a gentle 2.3k with Superflake to round off the afternoon's activities.

Had a chat to Sean Williams after the race - he was pretty happy with my time, noting I'd beaten Cindy Williams, a 38 minute 10k runner who is handy on hilly courses, by about 40 seconds, so it was good to get some positive feedback even though I felt I'd compromised my race on the first lap.

Also debuted my flourescent green Asics Magic Racers today, which I picked up on sale last week. They went pretty well.

Ended up a positive day, even though I wasn't in the best frame of mind before the event. Guess you can't be keyed up for every event.