A pleasant ride in, apart from when a car tries to jump the lights in Sandiacre and almost drives straight through me but then just sees me at the last minute. So I live to fight another day.
The route for the 2011 Kilomathon has now been announced and as expected it’s centred on Derby and is no longer a Nottingham to Derby run which was the attraction for us. So we did right in avoiding it and its naughty £45 price tag, opting for the more prestigious Reading Half Marathon instead.
The route though is quite interesting. Starting by Darley Park before looping out of Derby via Findern, Stenson, Barrow and Sinfin before finishing at the Moorways in Allenton.
The organiser is from Derby and I wonder if had half an eye on nostalgia when he set the route, as it seems to encompass part of the old Derby Ramathon route, which I believe started and finished at Moorways back in the 1980’s. If it’s similar next year, I might give it a go.
I cycle to John Carroll pool which is shut do to the ‘water quality’, whatever that means... it’s never exactly been clean. They say it might open at 7.00 or it might not. Which is nice and indecisive. No matter, I’ll just pedal up to the new pool at Djanogly... or rather I won’t, its Ladies only until 6.45 then shut. How sexist. Men not allowed a post work swim then? I suppose in desperation there’s always Beechdale... or not. Closed at 5pm, just as people were leaving work. How convenient.
I head home before heading back out later for a pizza and a few jars with a friend. The route to the car park is blocked by a massive lorry, must be Interpol arriving for tomorrow. Looking forward to that.
After the pizza we pop into Langtry’s where they have Hobgoblin on, which is just the pick me up for a frustrated swimmer. Not that I would ever normally regard myself as a swimmer until I’m unable to swim that is.
(Tuesday 23rd November)
Showing posts with label Kilomathon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kilomathon. Show all posts
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Blackmail
L gets up at the unearthly hour of 5am to take Son to the station so that he can be back at Warwick for a 9am lecture. Despite the fact she’s only gone for less than half an hour, MD has to go through the whole welcoming a member of his pack home routine, loudly. So now the whole street are awake, including Daughter who is on half term break and is particularly unhappy about it. After which, it hardly seems worth us going back to sleep, so we don’t.
Talking of MD. L saw this, the World Loudest Bark, and thought of him. He should have been there. Oddly there doesn’t seem to be a collie among them.
The understatement of the year award goes to the organisers of the Birmingham Half Marathon who have admitted the event needs ‘fine tuning’... They’re referring to the delays crossing the finish line, which were so obvious they couldn’t deny they’d happened. They seem to be in denial about everything else. Even then they blame that problem on medical incidents which ‘had to be dealt with quickly’. Which wasn’t the case. There may have been a medical incident but there always is somebody who’s need medical attention after a half marathon and they would/should have been prepared for that. The hold up was actually caused by the handing out of foil blankets, water and collecting timing chips far too close to the finish line. That was obvious when I arrived, as it was already starting to back up then.
Steve Hollingworth, Birmingham City Council's director of sport and events, goes on to mention the ‘great feedback’ they’ve had. Hmmm. There are over 300 messages across three forums on Runners World and rising by the minute. Probably only two or three of them could be described as ‘great feedback’, the rest are highly critical.
Something I learn from looking at all the post race comments is that everyone rates the Reading Half Marathon as a really big, well run marathon - 12,300 finished this years in March.
It’s the world’s 19th largest Half Marathon according to 2009 figures and second only to the Great North Run in the UK. 5th biggest in Europe.
1. 30th Goteborg, Sweden 40,523
2. Bupa Great North Run, UK 37,582
3. OneAmerica 500 Festival, USA 30,281
4. Country Music, USA 22,920
5. P.F. Chang’s, Arizona, USA 22,111
6. Paris, France 21,552
7. Rock ‘n’ Roll San Antonio, USA 20,077
8. Vattenfall Berliner, Germany 17,888
9. Rock ‘n’ Roll Las Vegas, USA 17,880
10. Rock ‘n’ Roll, USA 15,729
11. Rock ‘n’ Roll Seattle, USA 15,677
12. Wien-Energie, Austria 15,483
13. Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicago, USA 14,459
14. Chicago, USA 13,532
15. Nike Women’s, USA 13,421
16. Walt Disney World, USA 12,444
17. ING Philadelphia, USA 12,379
18. Medellin Int’l, Columbia 12,100
19. Reading, UK 11,867
20. Disneyland, USA 11,645
It’s already almost full, so if we’re interested we’ll have to get in quick. L says she’s game. I assume she means for the race.
However it’s the same day as the Kilomathon. Which I’d like to support, as it's local, but they’re being very cagey about the route, which is worrying. I have no wish to do circuits of Derby’s new ring road, if it’s finished by then.
I check the Kilomathon website to see if there’s any update on the route and my support suddenly evaporates. They say they have changed the entry system to 'something much more beneficial to charities and also gives runners the option to enter a fantastic road race for just £5'... if you raise at lot of money for charity that is. That's blackmail. If you don’t fund raise then its £45, which is an inflation busting increase of 50% on last year's price of £30, plus a £2.75 booking fee of course. I'm thoroughly fed up with running being hijacked by charities. Reading isn’t that far is it?
(Monday 25th October)
Talking of MD. L saw this, the World Loudest Bark, and thought of him. He should have been there. Oddly there doesn’t seem to be a collie among them.
The understatement of the year award goes to the organisers of the Birmingham Half Marathon who have admitted the event needs ‘fine tuning’... They’re referring to the delays crossing the finish line, which were so obvious they couldn’t deny they’d happened. They seem to be in denial about everything else. Even then they blame that problem on medical incidents which ‘had to be dealt with quickly’. Which wasn’t the case. There may have been a medical incident but there always is somebody who’s need medical attention after a half marathon and they would/should have been prepared for that. The hold up was actually caused by the handing out of foil blankets, water and collecting timing chips far too close to the finish line. That was obvious when I arrived, as it was already starting to back up then.
Steve Hollingworth, Birmingham City Council's director of sport and events, goes on to mention the ‘great feedback’ they’ve had. Hmmm. There are over 300 messages across three forums on Runners World and rising by the minute. Probably only two or three of them could be described as ‘great feedback’, the rest are highly critical.
Something I learn from looking at all the post race comments is that everyone rates the Reading Half Marathon as a really big, well run marathon - 12,300 finished this years in March.
It’s the world’s 19th largest Half Marathon according to 2009 figures and second only to the Great North Run in the UK. 5th biggest in Europe.
1. 30th Goteborg, Sweden 40,523
2. Bupa Great North Run, UK 37,582
3. OneAmerica 500 Festival, USA 30,281
4. Country Music, USA 22,920
5. P.F. Chang’s, Arizona, USA 22,111
6. Paris, France 21,552
7. Rock ‘n’ Roll San Antonio, USA 20,077
8. Vattenfall Berliner, Germany 17,888
9. Rock ‘n’ Roll Las Vegas, USA 17,880
10. Rock ‘n’ Roll, USA 15,729
11. Rock ‘n’ Roll Seattle, USA 15,677
12. Wien-Energie, Austria 15,483
13. Rock ‘n’ Roll Chicago, USA 14,459
14. Chicago, USA 13,532
15. Nike Women’s, USA 13,421
16. Walt Disney World, USA 12,444
17. ING Philadelphia, USA 12,379
18. Medellin Int’l, Columbia 12,100
19. Reading, UK 11,867
20. Disneyland, USA 11,645
It’s already almost full, so if we’re interested we’ll have to get in quick. L says she’s game. I assume she means for the race.
However it’s the same day as the Kilomathon. Which I’d like to support, as it's local, but they’re being very cagey about the route, which is worrying. I have no wish to do circuits of Derby’s new ring road, if it’s finished by then.
I check the Kilomathon website to see if there’s any update on the route and my support suddenly evaporates. They say they have changed the entry system to 'something much more beneficial to charities and also gives runners the option to enter a fantastic road race for just £5'... if you raise at lot of money for charity that is. That's blackmail. If you don’t fund raise then its £45, which is an inflation busting increase of 50% on last year's price of £30, plus a £2.75 booking fee of course. I'm thoroughly fed up with running being hijacked by charities. Reading isn’t that far is it?
(Monday 25th October)
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Two Minutes And About Fifty Seconds
The black cloud that appeared in November and has been hovering threateningly somewhere in the distant future ever since, although gradually creeping closer, is now overhead. Yep, it’s Kilomathon day. My two work colleagues who were going to accompany me have both fallen by the wayside. One got injured and never trained for it. The other trained for it, then stopped, then decided he wasn’t fit enough. I’m not sure I’m fit enough either, but there’s only way to find out.
It is after all, as the organisers keep telling us, the world's first Kilomathon but perhaps simply because no one had thought of doing a race over 26.2 kilometres (16.3 miles) before. Which is to me still a bizarre concept but it’s a concept that may catch on, so expect to see perhaps even a Half Kilomathon appearing near you soon. For me though, it was purely the fact that this bizarre concept was from Nottingham to Derby that appealed to me. That’s from where I live to where I work, and almost even door to door. So I had to do it really.
It’s so door to door that we walk to the assembly point on the Nottingham University campus. They reckon they have 6000 entries and from the amount of people milling around, they might even be right.
The start is a bit of a mess though. It said on the published information that baggage buses, taking your stuff to the finish in Derby, would close at 8.30, half an hour before race start. This wasn’t good news because it’s March and it’s been a coldish March at that, so standing around, in race gear for half-an-hour in the cold was not an appetising prospect. Which could have been a whole lot worse had it rained.
It got worse though because as we arrived the tannoy was demanding that everybody went to the baggage buses NOW, as they would now close at 8.10. As it happened, it turned out to be a lie but attempting to rip up the published timetable like that, which was rushed anyway, and subject people to 50 minutes of cold, was not the best of ideas.
The pre-race warm-up was already in full swing and not very well attended, understandable really. What's the point of a warm-up an hour before the start of a race?
Still I was stripped and in my colour coded assembly pen, shivering with all the others, as demanded half an hour before the start, simply because I didn’t want to lose the good start I had been given. My slot was in the first block of runners behind the elite few.
Half an hour also seemed to be the average waiting time for the toilets. I think they ought to look at festival style urinals next time because they’ll never be able to rent enough portaloos.
Then they walked us up to the start, which was on the main road, where we had to wait the twenty minutes until 9am, whilst the rest of the race assembled behind us. I line up alongside a chap who is using the race as a training run for the Edinburgh marathon. If that didn’t make me feel inferior he went on to brag about his two previous marathons, in Prague and Berlin, of all places. I nod and smile politely before turning my back on him and talking to the chap on the other side of me. He was a fell runner, who was feeling a tad unfit after a decadent holiday, so he’d gone out and run twelve miles on Tuesday and then twenty miles on Thursday. My jaw was already on the floor when he told me that he too was using this event as training, in his case for a forty mile trail race next week. I’m doing an 18km trail race next week I mumble quietly, secretly hoping no one hears. Then I shuffle backwards a bit and leave the two of them to talk among themselves.
Finally, we start. It takes me seventeen seconds to cross the start line. I find out later that apparently it takes L ten minutes, so it must be a fairly big field. After the problems pre-race, once it got started, the organisation was much better and I really enjoyed the race. Although I feel I start too slowly, or perhaps it was just those seventeen seconds at the start upsetting my timekeeping but then I go a bit too quick compensating before I finally settle into the right pace.
One of my key concerns was whether the course would be marked out in Km’s. It ought to be, being a Kilomathon, but all the maps they sent out were marked in miles. I didn’t mind either way, as I’ve been running in miles for the last two weeks but would like to know for sure in advance, to get my head around which of 4.30 per km or 7.20 per mile it’s going to be. That is to break my target of two hours. L’s reason for knowing is even more vital, whether to carry twenty-six jelly beans or sixteen. I hope she has deep pockets, it’s in km.
Some folk claimed that the markers were easy to see, I beg to differ. They were too small, dark in colour and didn’t stand out at all, despite the fact they’d put red streamers on them. Personally I’d like flashing lights on them; organisers please take note for next year. So I missed half of them and in the end I stopped looking.
Eventually I got into those steady 4.30 minute km’s but start to losing the pace far too early, in fact in the 11th km. I blame the head wind, which seemed to be with us nearly all the way around and was making this harder than it should be. I already knew the course was slightly uphill, pretty much all the way, and I soon started to notice how relentless this was. Perhaps when they hold this again next year, they could run it in reverse?
That is, if they hold it again. The race needs to build itself a solid base of local support. Unfortunately there were too many idiots using ‘adhoc’ toilet facilities both near the start and in the first mile. So that probably put paid to the good will of the local residents. Although that all comes back to the portaloo farce earlier.
The crowds lining the course were vocal but smaller than I expected, perhaps not enough advertising was done. Race wise though, the course was well signposted and enthusiastically marshalled and the drinks stops were good. Although energy gels at the first stop as well as the second would have saved me from having to carry my own.
At half way I’m almost bang on the hour, on target and bang on the required pace but I’m only on target if I can hold this pace and I know I can’t. At 18km it starts to go out again but I must have had a brief revival because at 21 km, which is half marathon distance, I’m only 14 seconds down on last week. This isn’t much but I’m not feeling as good as last week and my pace soon slips out to 5 minute km’s.
There’s a rather odd section just outside Elvaston Castle Country Park where they send us around a hairpin of cones, presumably to make the distance up. We then enter the park and do a rather pointless loop there, that didn’t even take us past the house itself. Some people will have liked the variation in terrain but not me. Then we do another small loop out to Ambaston. It would be nice if in future years they ditched these bits and extended the start and finish closer to the respective cities, making it true city to city.
Then it’s the final stretch through Alvaston to the finish on the park there, which they could have made more of and better for spectators but the post-race facilities were good. I headed straight to the beer tent (naturally) for my free beer where I chatted merrily to the other runners there. With hindsight this was a mistake. What I should have done was grab my free beer and take it up to one of the other tents where the girls from University were giving out a free massage. By the time I found out about this particular perk, the queue for the girls was already out of control.
In the end the race took me two hours, two minutes and about fifty seconds. That's two minutes and about fifty seconds off my target. Suppose it’s not much if you say it quickly but I was gutted naturally. I just ran out of steam towards the end. I could have done with them handing out a fresh pair of legs at the last drinks station or perhaps, organisers please take note for next year, they could relocate the University girls to there? That might help.
I’m still secretly pleased of course, as I did beat around 4000 others, as well as my two ‘no show’ work colleague and of course all those who never got off the sofa in the first place.
The T-shirt is ok, I will wear it with pride to the pub but it’s not something you would race or train in, so the organisers have missed out on the chance of some good publicity there. Then there’s the medal which is some serious piece of metalwork.
If I was secretly pleased, L was shouting her delight from the roof tops as she beat her target time by some distance. The organisers must have been impressed too, as she got a personal text message of congratulations from them afterwards. I didn’t! But perhaps I didn’t leave them my number.
Overall a good event, which needs tweaking a bit but I’d definitely do it again. I’ve got to really, to beat that pesky two hour mark.
We then stagger/walk/crawl into Derby whilst my ever supportive father goes to fetch my mother, so we even get to celebrate mother’s day with Sunday lunch in the Royal Standard and so many pints, that we’re too sloshed to go out as planned in the evening.
It is after all, as the organisers keep telling us, the world's first Kilomathon but perhaps simply because no one had thought of doing a race over 26.2 kilometres (16.3 miles) before. Which is to me still a bizarre concept but it’s a concept that may catch on, so expect to see perhaps even a Half Kilomathon appearing near you soon. For me though, it was purely the fact that this bizarre concept was from Nottingham to Derby that appealed to me. That’s from where I live to where I work, and almost even door to door. So I had to do it really.
It’s so door to door that we walk to the assembly point on the Nottingham University campus. They reckon they have 6000 entries and from the amount of people milling around, they might even be right.
The start is a bit of a mess though. It said on the published information that baggage buses, taking your stuff to the finish in Derby, would close at 8.30, half an hour before race start. This wasn’t good news because it’s March and it’s been a coldish March at that, so standing around, in race gear for half-an-hour in the cold was not an appetising prospect. Which could have been a whole lot worse had it rained.
It got worse though because as we arrived the tannoy was demanding that everybody went to the baggage buses NOW, as they would now close at 8.10. As it happened, it turned out to be a lie but attempting to rip up the published timetable like that, which was rushed anyway, and subject people to 50 minutes of cold, was not the best of ideas.
The pre-race warm-up was already in full swing and not very well attended, understandable really. What's the point of a warm-up an hour before the start of a race?
Still I was stripped and in my colour coded assembly pen, shivering with all the others, as demanded half an hour before the start, simply because I didn’t want to lose the good start I had been given. My slot was in the first block of runners behind the elite few.
Half an hour also seemed to be the average waiting time for the toilets. I think they ought to look at festival style urinals next time because they’ll never be able to rent enough portaloos.
Then they walked us up to the start, which was on the main road, where we had to wait the twenty minutes until 9am, whilst the rest of the race assembled behind us. I line up alongside a chap who is using the race as a training run for the Edinburgh marathon. If that didn’t make me feel inferior he went on to brag about his two previous marathons, in Prague and Berlin, of all places. I nod and smile politely before turning my back on him and talking to the chap on the other side of me. He was a fell runner, who was feeling a tad unfit after a decadent holiday, so he’d gone out and run twelve miles on Tuesday and then twenty miles on Thursday. My jaw was already on the floor when he told me that he too was using this event as training, in his case for a forty mile trail race next week. I’m doing an 18km trail race next week I mumble quietly, secretly hoping no one hears. Then I shuffle backwards a bit and leave the two of them to talk among themselves.
Finally, we start. It takes me seventeen seconds to cross the start line. I find out later that apparently it takes L ten minutes, so it must be a fairly big field. After the problems pre-race, once it got started, the organisation was much better and I really enjoyed the race. Although I feel I start too slowly, or perhaps it was just those seventeen seconds at the start upsetting my timekeeping but then I go a bit too quick compensating before I finally settle into the right pace.
One of my key concerns was whether the course would be marked out in Km’s. It ought to be, being a Kilomathon, but all the maps they sent out were marked in miles. I didn’t mind either way, as I’ve been running in miles for the last two weeks but would like to know for sure in advance, to get my head around which of 4.30 per km or 7.20 per mile it’s going to be. That is to break my target of two hours. L’s reason for knowing is even more vital, whether to carry twenty-six jelly beans or sixteen. I hope she has deep pockets, it’s in km.
Some folk claimed that the markers were easy to see, I beg to differ. They were too small, dark in colour and didn’t stand out at all, despite the fact they’d put red streamers on them. Personally I’d like flashing lights on them; organisers please take note for next year. So I missed half of them and in the end I stopped looking.
Eventually I got into those steady 4.30 minute km’s but start to losing the pace far too early, in fact in the 11th km. I blame the head wind, which seemed to be with us nearly all the way around and was making this harder than it should be. I already knew the course was slightly uphill, pretty much all the way, and I soon started to notice how relentless this was. Perhaps when they hold this again next year, they could run it in reverse?
That is, if they hold it again. The race needs to build itself a solid base of local support. Unfortunately there were too many idiots using ‘adhoc’ toilet facilities both near the start and in the first mile. So that probably put paid to the good will of the local residents. Although that all comes back to the portaloo farce earlier.
The crowds lining the course were vocal but smaller than I expected, perhaps not enough advertising was done. Race wise though, the course was well signposted and enthusiastically marshalled and the drinks stops were good. Although energy gels at the first stop as well as the second would have saved me from having to carry my own.
At half way I’m almost bang on the hour, on target and bang on the required pace but I’m only on target if I can hold this pace and I know I can’t. At 18km it starts to go out again but I must have had a brief revival because at 21 km, which is half marathon distance, I’m only 14 seconds down on last week. This isn’t much but I’m not feeling as good as last week and my pace soon slips out to 5 minute km’s.
There’s a rather odd section just outside Elvaston Castle Country Park where they send us around a hairpin of cones, presumably to make the distance up. We then enter the park and do a rather pointless loop there, that didn’t even take us past the house itself. Some people will have liked the variation in terrain but not me. Then we do another small loop out to Ambaston. It would be nice if in future years they ditched these bits and extended the start and finish closer to the respective cities, making it true city to city.
Then it’s the final stretch through Alvaston to the finish on the park there, which they could have made more of and better for spectators but the post-race facilities were good. I headed straight to the beer tent (naturally) for my free beer where I chatted merrily to the other runners there. With hindsight this was a mistake. What I should have done was grab my free beer and take it up to one of the other tents where the girls from University were giving out a free massage. By the time I found out about this particular perk, the queue for the girls was already out of control.
In the end the race took me two hours, two minutes and about fifty seconds. That's two minutes and about fifty seconds off my target. Suppose it’s not much if you say it quickly but I was gutted naturally. I just ran out of steam towards the end. I could have done with them handing out a fresh pair of legs at the last drinks station or perhaps, organisers please take note for next year, they could relocate the University girls to there? That might help.
I’m still secretly pleased of course, as I did beat around 4000 others, as well as my two ‘no show’ work colleague and of course all those who never got off the sofa in the first place.
The T-shirt is ok, I will wear it with pride to the pub but it’s not something you would race or train in, so the organisers have missed out on the chance of some good publicity there. Then there’s the medal which is some serious piece of metalwork.
If I was secretly pleased, L was shouting her delight from the roof tops as she beat her target time by some distance. The organisers must have been impressed too, as she got a personal text message of congratulations from them afterwards. I didn’t! But perhaps I didn’t leave them my number.
Overall a good event, which needs tweaking a bit but I’d definitely do it again. I’ve got to really, to beat that pesky two hour mark.
We then stagger/walk/crawl into Derby whilst my ever supportive father goes to fetch my mother, so we even get to celebrate mother’s day with Sunday lunch in the Royal Standard and so many pints, that we’re too sloshed to go out as planned in the evening.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
I Don't Like The Look Of That
I take the bus in to work. It’s big run day today and I’m planning on running 12 miles tonight. This is all training for the Kilomathon and I notice that they have now put up the route on the internet
and an elevation map.
Which I don't like the look of, at all. It’s uphill all the way. I suppose I should have known that but all my training has so far been, although along parts of the actual race route, in the opposite, eastbound direction, e.g. downhill.
So it’s all the more worrying that when I run the route after work, backwards and downhill, my pace is terribly slow. At this rate I won’t break two hours for the course and will struggle to make 2.20 but at least I seem to cope with the distance ok. My legs feel ok until I try and up the pace in the last few miles, making those last few miles not pleasant at all. Still I suppose with six weeks to go we’re still in base training territory. Speed can come (maybe) later.
I run 12.5 miles to the centre of Beeston where I meet L who has walked the dogs up and brought me a change of clothes. L threatens to be on the wine tonight, so heads off to raid the nearest cash machine for a wheelbarrow of money. The wine isn’t cheap at the Victoria. I have no such concerns, they have a beer festival on, so the beer choice should be good.
We don’t get a place inside the pub as it’s so busy and end up the huge tent thing they have in the garden there. It’s quite pleasant actually as they have big gas heaters keeping it warm. I sit under one as my body is now haemorrhaging heat at a rate of knots after my exertions. I’m even colder than L for once. Thankfully they have a nice spicy curry on their food menu for me to refuel with. Oh and the beer of course.
and an elevation map.
Which I don't like the look of, at all. It’s uphill all the way. I suppose I should have known that but all my training has so far been, although along parts of the actual race route, in the opposite, eastbound direction, e.g. downhill.
So it’s all the more worrying that when I run the route after work, backwards and downhill, my pace is terribly slow. At this rate I won’t break two hours for the course and will struggle to make 2.20 but at least I seem to cope with the distance ok. My legs feel ok until I try and up the pace in the last few miles, making those last few miles not pleasant at all. Still I suppose with six weeks to go we’re still in base training territory. Speed can come (maybe) later.
I run 12.5 miles to the centre of Beeston where I meet L who has walked the dogs up and brought me a change of clothes. L threatens to be on the wine tonight, so heads off to raid the nearest cash machine for a wheelbarrow of money. The wine isn’t cheap at the Victoria. I have no such concerns, they have a beer festival on, so the beer choice should be good.
We don’t get a place inside the pub as it’s so busy and end up the huge tent thing they have in the garden there. It’s quite pleasant actually as they have big gas heaters keeping it warm. I sit under one as my body is now haemorrhaging heat at a rate of knots after my exertions. I’m even colder than L for once. Thankfully they have a nice spicy curry on their food menu for me to refuel with. Oh and the beer of course.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
