Monday 1 August 2011

The TR24 - Adidas Thunder Run - PART 2

The fourth laps came round quickly with both Linda and Rakesh out of the race. Pete finishes his with a knackered ankle and somehow had pulled I think a 64 minute lap out of the bag which after his third lap and personal prediction of a 90 minute one was a real boost for the team. Again Chris and Steve banged in their usual low 50's lap (those two are machines) and I set off for my forth lap advising that it would be very slow and to expect a 90 minute one or me on a stretcher.

Once I got going though I found that if I ran while sort of rolling my shoulders transferring the weight from one leg to another I could jog without too much pain. The best way I can describe it is to imagine a stereotypical scouser chappy walking ala Harry Enfield and you've just pictured my new running style ( if you're still unsure look here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qamVB...2F16B6C7C6F978 - Note these is some bad language). I'm calling it Scouse Running - the book will be available on Kindle for Christmas. Ok I could not run fast, looked rather silly and the down hill stretches were still bloody painful but I was coping. I made it round in about 73 minutes which I had to be happy with considering. That was 22 laps in the bag and both Steve and Chris wanted to go for the 5th lap and the kudos of having run 50 kilometers on some pretty tough terrain in 24 hours.

Chris does his fifth lap in I think 58-59 minutes and finishes with a "Oh I think that'll do, I felt that one". Steve finishes in I think a similar time and looks to me like he could have done another. He's looking for me in the holding area to do my fifth waving the baton about. What he does not know is that I've been talked out of it by Pete who sensibly reminds me I'm driving home after the race and a two hour drive might be pushing it after another lap while injured and that we'd reached our goal. Though today as I write this I do sort of wish I'd done that last 10k and got myself into the 50k club. Oh well next year.

So we call it a day, we'd reach our goal of 24 laps, pushed ourselves as hard as we could and had the best race we could considering everything and that this was our first go at it. We collected our HUGE and quite frankly gorgeous medals, cracked a bottle of champagne and celebrated in style - or at least a reasonable impression of it.

Would I do it again? Like a shot. Not only was this by far the best race event I've ever attended but I've got that 50k goal set in my mind. Hats off to the organisers for putting this on, perfect, the toilets were kept constantly clean and the showers always had hot water. This is one of those endurance races that's as hard as you want to make it which means you have a massive range of abilities all of which adds to the carnival atmosphere. Boy am I going to have to up my training for next year :-). The results are out and we finished 94th out of 147 teams in the 6-8 mixed. Not at all bad.

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