Sunday, November 08, 2009

Exeter 3K Series

Monday 2nd Nov saw the Westgates at Exeter Arena home of the mighty SWRR and Exeter Harriers for the 2nd round of the current 3K winter series. A great and very welcome surprise was the appearance of Lin and Martin. Obviously the 3K distance must hold a special attraction to warrant another long drive; maybe they were trying to work out why their 3K splits in a 5K are faster than their 3K track races.

Anyway the evening was surprisingly dry with little breeze and a large turnout. There were six seeded groups with the slowest off first. Lesley was in the 2nd group and soon eased herself into 3rd place. Someone remarked that she had a very fast but efficient turnover but not quite fast enough to prevent her being pushed back to 4th near the finish. However her 13-20 was another PB.

Lin and I were in the 4th group and I settled down to a sluggish rhythm trying to avoid clipping the heels of a tall bloke who in turn was running extremely close on the heels of Lin who in turn was close to a youngster whose pace changed. I wasn’t running particularly comfortably but managed to keep going and seem to remember running close to Lin for the last 2 laps. Rather than have any possibility of being accused of draughting I moved out and tried to run alongside. On the final straight I managed to ease past her and finished just 3 seconds off my 12-00 min. target.

Martin was in the 5th group and he produced an outstanding last lap with a spectacular final 100 metres.

2 comments:

martin said...

Well done Lesley on an excellent PB. Very exciting for a minute as you overtook that young lad at the start of the last lap, and almost held off the challenge of that young lady at the line.
Well done to Richard too for a good run. I wonder how much faster you can go? You are going to have to run well under 12 minutes to beat Lin next time. Should be interesting...

Lin said...

Lin's disclaimer: I had nothing to do with Martin's comment regarding running under 12 minutes next time in order to beat me. So no pressure....
Interestingly we were back on the track on Friday evening at Yeovil Arena to do a club handicap 5k with YTRRC.....and with no race adrenalin and running on my own I still went through the 3km at 12.09!!!