Friday 27 July 2012

Sutherland2Surf 2012

This was my 4th year in a row racing the Sutherland2Surf fun run, however, I was not in the best form this year. I have had only about 2-3 weeks run training after being out for a month with a knee injury and returned home from the training camp in Canberra extremely sick just 2 weeks before but I was determined to go out there and give it all as this is my favourite running race of the year. It was the first time since I started running the Sutherland2Surf that the weather was pretty bad, the rain was fairly heavy and some moderate wind gusts made it a difficult course this year. To my surprise there was still a very big turn out on the day, seeing over 6400 competitors finish the race. I noticed as I was warming up that there was a few good juniors getting around so it looked to be a good race.

Race start was 8am, thanks to my good finish last year I was able to get a seeded bib number so I could start with the top 100 on the front line. Start was pretty hectic, a few guys almost going to the ground but I got a clean start. The road was very wet and some of the corners early on in the race were a bit sketchy. The field stretched out quickly, one guy went himself from the start and had a nice gap between me and about 15 other runners. Around the 5km mark my pack started to split up, a group of 6 or 7 started to pull away as I started to struggle due to the lack of training prior, luckily I had a few guys around me so I could still pace off them. The remaining 3km I was sitting in equal 10th with a fellow U19 competitor, with around a km and a half to go he managed to pull away a bit on the downhill but caught him back up on the uphill. It was now about 700m to go and still equal, I knew I had to do something as it was a downhill finish and he had been making gaps on the downhills so I decided to go, he did not expect it and I was able to get in front by a fair few meters. It was now the last corner and starting the downhill to the finish, I had about a 30m lead and I could hear him closing in. Now about 50m to go, I did not want to turn around in case I lost speed but just went for it as I knew he was close, over the finish and he had not passed me.

I checked the results that night I saw that I had placed equal 10th overall and equal 1st in the U19's. I am pretty happy with my result, ran exactly the same time a last year (36:55) according to my watch but was timed as 37:10. Was hoping to run near 36:30 in this years race but with the weather conditions and the condition I was in, I was really happy to finish with a time of that above and 1st in my age category again