Race Day!

The big day got here!  I was on my feet at my sister's place just after 6:00am and had a coffee with her and JP.  It'd been raining on and off all night and the rain kept falling enthusiastically when I got on the road.  I have to say that I was looking out at the windscreen wipers and thinking "this is gonna be a loooooooong morning!".

The rain had stopped by the time I got to Lake Wendouree at Ballarat, although there was still a pretty steady wind blowing.  I went over to the marshalling point at one of the boat-sheds, collected my number and timing device and sized up the 45 or so other runners.  Mostly they were in their 30s and 40s, and mostly seemed to be Victoria Police officers, although I saw a few people with shirts or caps from the Prison Service, the Ambulance Service, the Country Fire Authority and the Federal Police.  I think I was the only SES member.

 

We shivered our way out to the starting line and off we went.  There was an initial short 3 km loop, followed by 3 laps of the 6 km track around the lake.  I'd been giving a bit of thought to how I'd go out on the way up and decided to go hard for the first 4 kms or so, then settle to a steady pace.  I managed this and found that the steady pace I landed on was quite speedy and put me about the middle of the pack.  To my surprise, I found that I was able to more-or-less hold that pace until the 11 kilometre mark, which was the first point I'd set to check my speed and time etc on Runkeeper.  It was a little after this point that I actually managed to catch someone: I'd been passed by a runner from the Fire Authority about the 5 km mark, and I couldn't let that go unanswered - I kept her in view until a bit after 11 kms, and then increased speed just enough to overtake her - although I then spent the rest of the race waiting for her to turn the tables on me and overtake me again.  Trying to outrun her kept my pace up!

I kept the pace up until the 16 km mark and saw that I was still averaging just under 5 minutes per kilometre, which I'd never have believed I could do.  I increased the pace a little bit from that point to the 19 km mark, and then increased it again and lengthened my stride a bit - I couldn't believe I was managing it!  With 500 metres to go I started to sprint and crossed the line with an average pace of 4:59 mins/km, which is a definite PB for me, and a Runkeeper time of 1:47:29 (since confirmed by the official timekeeper).  I was 20th out of 40 runners, and 14th of the 23 men.  I was absolutely thrilled, and if you'd asked me I would have sworn that it was impossible for me to do it.

The final part of the event was presentation of medals to the first, second and third in each age group (alas, I didn't quite make the cut!) - the medals were presented by none other than Steve Moneghetti, who is one of the gods of Australian long distance running.  It was an honour just to be in the same room as him!

I set off back to the Goulburn Valley about 12:30pm.  For the sake of not having over-long posts, I'll cover the balance of the day in the next post.