Another Race Report

Last Night I ran the Spar Lantern 10km race in Irene. 

I ran it last year with Nola, Louise and Kerry and it was my first ever 10km race and I did it in (an official) time of 1:13:30.  Just checking in my log book, I wrote “travelled with Louise, great fun, congested start, disorientated in the dark, loads of fun” and the only thing that was different this year was that the dark wasn’t disorientating and my (official) time was a little better at 1:10:15.

My day started early and in quite a bizarre way.  Because I wouldn’t be running in the morning, I was quite excited to be sleeping in until 6am.  But, our cat, Angel, had a different idea.  She came into our room at 5am with a mouse.  She didn’t want to be catching the mouse, she wanted to  play cat and mouse. The squeaking mouse woke my husband up, he put the light on a tried in vain to assist Angel in catching the mouse.  Eventually, just after 6am and after providing me with much entertainment, Ian caught the mouse and removed it (I didn’t ask to where).

After dropping my eldest daughter at school I came home to bake banana bread. (There is an excess of bananas on the market so we are able to buy bananas at R3.50/kg (about $0.50/kg))  I bought a few kilos on Tuesday and we froze a lot of them to use in smoothies and I used the rest to make banana bread.  I ate 2 slices as my after-lunch dessert, another slice before we left for our run and another slice at 9pm when we got back from our run. The great news is that there is still some left for me to eat today!!

My husband, myself and Nola left home at 4.30.  The traffic was so horrific that it took us an hour to travel 4.5kms to collect Louise.  She eventually walked to meet us and we travelled the next 10kms in 20 minutes.  We arrived at the venue 6 minutes before the start of the race and we still had to put our bags at the club tent and the girls needed to get temporary license numbers!  Needless to say, the race started without us and we crossed the start line 3 and a half minutes after the start gun and behind the 5km Fun Run/Walk participants.  This obviously made for a slow and congested start with a lot of running taking place on the grassy pavements. 

One of the reasons that I love this race is that you are running along country roads thru’ dairy farms and you get to see and smell the cows. 

(The sign says “Here cows are Queen)

 

 

It is also an out and back course so you see the winning runners on their return (They made half way and I wasn’t yet at the 3km mark).

 

 

 

My kilometer splits looked like this:

1	00:07:15	1.00	07:15
2	00:06:31	1.00	06:31
3	00:07:31	1.00	07:31
4	00:06:34	1.00	06:34
5	00:06:45	1.00	06:45
6	00:06:15	1.00	06:15
7	00:06:28	1.00	06:28
8	00:06:29	1.00	06:29
9	00:06:27	1.00	06:27
10	00:06:09	1.00	06:09
11	00:00:44	0.14	05:23

The first km was getting thru’ the people and the third km was going to the toilet.  The last km was making sure a certain individual didn’t beat me.  He (not my husband) was behind me right until we stepped onto the grass a few metres from the finish banner and I didn’t see him until it was too late.  He finished 4 people in front of me.  The funniest part of my ‘race to the finish’ was that he didn’t know I was racing him.

Ian, Nola and Louise had good runs too and we were all pleased that we hadn’t turned back on the numerous occassions that the traffic looked so bad that we thought we wouldn’t make the race.

Thanks to all at Irene Runners that made this such a great event.