I'm back now in Sea Palling after the weekend's Great North Run exploits. I'd only been away four nights, but the spiders and woodlice had taken over. I'm starting to feel very comfortable here now, since there shouldn't be anyone coming in at the weekends for a while, so I'm making it a bit more my own. I also have a really good gas heater now, courtesy of Rick, the kindly husband of one of my new colleagues, Louise. I'm starting to feel confident that I could make it through the winter months.
Anyway, the run was a lot harder than I had thought it was going to be. As you may have noted, I'd only done one run of more than two hours in training, and I think that may have been a bit of a miscalculation. I wasn't very far away from being fit enough to do the run at my 'race pace' (just under seven minutes per kilometre) but I really needed more stamina. I ended up crumbling a bit in the final hour of my two hour forty minute effort. I even walked a couple of times, but only when I was taking on water/Lucozade.
The people of Shields gave an excellent account of themselves, having taken the time to prepare orange segments, handfuls of sweets and my favourite, ice pops. I wouldn't have pulled myself through it without their goodwill, and also without the occassional sight of someone doing marginally worse than me.
There were some people, running for Childline, whose t-shirts stated that they were 'going the extra mile'. Sod that.
I don't think that the half marathon is really my distance. It goes beyond running and into endurance territory. It's all well and good for the eight stone superfit athletes, but for me, still 14 stone, it's just a bit too much.
I have a 10k run coming up in Great Yarmouth this month, and I am actually looking forward to that as being something well within my comfort zone. I don't intend to let my ability to run around non-stop for an hour or so to slip - I intend to take up some kind of sport, preferably non-contact, and not squash.
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