The Handicap Cup

I had a really good run at the December running of the Sandhurst Joggers Club Handicap.  This year was one where I wanted to make an effort to join in a lot more club events and I have managed to do 10 of the handicaps this year after never having done them before.  The course runs around the hilly side of Crowthorne - two laps making four miles, two BIG hills, two short steep hills and some descents to fly down – it’s a good challenging run to do at speed. 

Going into the last run, I was top of the points leader board (based on points from best 7 runs) having managed to steadily improve my PB from 33mins to 29:12 over the year.  However, there were at least two people in with a very good chance of overtaking me in the last event, Steve Sims and Gabriel Bassett.  Unfortunately Gabby couldn't make it on the night, though Steve was going to be there and I needed to be at least 3 places ahead of Steve to hang on to the lead.

Tactics?  Like every time I have run this time trial it's just a case of going as fast as possible and the only tactic I have is to try and make the two laps as even as possible. I thought Steve was going to go for a sub 28min time, so needed a 20sec PB.  To beat that I would have to go for a 30sec PB and hope 2 people placed in between us.  That meant aiming for about 28:45 and just over 7:11/mile pace.  

So I set the Garmin pacer up for that and once under way checked my watch on the first 400m to get used to the effort needed to maintain that pace.  I tried to keep that same effort going up the hills make up time on the descents and also try and keep someone ahead of me in site, but I was really gasping going over the last hill.  I hadn’t looked at my watch since the start, but I felt that I must have a lot of time to make up over the last half mile, so really pushed hard all the way home. I finished in 28:42, beating my handicap time by 32secs and feeling like I could not have gone any quicker.

The results looked like this:

That was a tight race and in the end there was only 4 seconds between 5th and 8th places in the results, but I just did enough to hang on to the overall first place position.  

It has been a really good year of running for me.  I have managed to improve at all distances I have run and have really tried to learn about training and what I can do to get faster.  Being able to test myself on our club handicap route has been really rewarding and coming away with the win in the overall competition was a great feeling.  

Now to get back down to sea level and Portsmouth Coastal Waterside Marathon.