Northern Waste#

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:38:49 +0000

Yesterday was the "Mac 2 North Region Inline Marathon", a.k.a 28 laps around a 1.6k track in Preston Sports Arena. Yes, I know that's more than 42k ... there was some kind of misunderstanding. Nice flat track, beautiful surface, good organisation, even good weather (not sure this was due to the event organisers, but nice to have anyway)

I'm going to chalk this one up to experience (by which I mean that I pretty much bollixed it up). The first few laps felt very very slow, as the entire field (there were only 18 of us there for the full marathon) was formed into one paceline and that was proceeding at a "nobody wants to pull" pace.

After a few laps of this the Powerslide team near the front of the line obviously got bored and decided to make a break. I saw the break as it happened and tried to go with it, but was being overtaken on both sides by faster people and was fairly clear I didn't have the pace for it. Once things had settled down again there was Matthew (a chap from Birmingham Wheels) ahead, and fellow LSSTers Alastair and Ed slightly behind, so formed a three-man paceline with them. Ed dropped off, Alastair and I caught Matthew, and we went round for a few laps together, but after a few laps we lost Alastair and after a few more with Matthew apparently flagging and me doing the bulk of the work I decided that if I was going to be leading all the time I might as well skate on my own anyway. So I pushed on a bit and lost Matthew. I think that was somewhere around lap 8 or 10. The rest of the "race" was mostly just a matter of going around and around saying hello (and sometimes "nice to see you again") to people.

Came in sixth - lapped by the two leaders Hans and Vinnie, but managed to stay on the same lap as the third, fourth and fifth placers. Once I'd finished and stopped I was seized by the sudden worry that I should have done one lap more, so I did. Luckily this was unnecessary, as it wasn't a very fast lap ...

Lessons learnt: work harder to stay with the break at the start. Or stick to races with more people in them. Other things I wish I'd known: I finished only 6s behind the guy in fifth place - if I'd realised he was so close, I'd have worked a bit harder. Doh.

Finishing time 1:32:13 for a 44.8k race, or about a 29km/h average. (Winning time was 1:28:44). What did I say last week about being unlikely to break 1:15 at Preston?