Week 10 - Silverstone

Weather conditions: A beautiful day at Silverstone.
Number of sessions: 2. This was not a good week for training. Motivation still wasn’t great and the odds seemed to be stacked against me. My first planned session on Tuesday evening was scuppered by an extremely late return home from Cambridge. Attempt number two to finally brave the Springfield Striders main club session on Thursday night also went totally ‘Pete Tong’. I got stuck in unexpected road works in Chelmsford meaning I got there too late. Instead of still going out for a run when I got home I just moaned.

On Sunday I headed off to Silverstone to run a half marathon. This race is touted as THE big London warm up with 10,000 runners participating many of whom didn’t disappoint in the usual rhino outfits or sporting a fibre glass Yellow Submarine. My Dad was official driver, coach, photographer and cheer leader for the day and he did a fab job – didn’t even lose it when we had to queue for over an hour to get out of the car park and then promptly queued on the A43 and worse still got diverted around St Albans as the M1 was closed.

It was great having the opportunity to run on the hallowed race track at Silverstone. The place is mahoosive and I can imagine the noise levels on Grand Prix day are something else. Unfortunately the crackly PA system didn’t provide much of a boost pumping out some well dodgy tunes as you circumnavigated the track. We had the very apt S Club ‘Don’t Stop Moving’, the awful ‘Boom Boom Boom Boom I want you in my room’ and the worst, 2 miles from the finish, ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’……the announcer was also rather annoying constantly giving out time checks. “You’ve got 2 minutes left if you want to hit a sub 1 hour 30 time” – yeah right I’ve still got 4 miles to go mate…

My highlights round the track had to be spotting a huge hare running across the grass at the 6 mile marker, signs that kept telling me to ‘brake’, overtaking ‘Pollard’ from Emmerdale at 10 miles (he was hobbling badly) and spotting my Dad on two occasions. The race didn’t get very good reviews on the Runner’s World website. Complaints about men relieving themselves up against the hoardings before the race even started, the crap goody bag (containing a XL t-shirt, a jar of Cranberry Sauce and a carton of Cranberry Juice) and the fact the course was actually a quarter of a mile too long….I finished 5013 out of about 10,000 (so almost half way) in 2 hours 15 minutes and 59 seconds. Not a PB but also not my worst half time and it was a longer course so I was happy.
Weekly mileage: 18 miles ish.
Total to date: 179.64 miles.

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