I just finished a 10.198km run that lasted about 0hh:41mm:19ss !
It was a crisp and cool morning, with the temperature at about 1 degrees Celsius at the start of the race. There was not a breath of wind and the it was a clear morning.
The Hawkes Bay Marathon and running festival has been running for about 5 years with this year the course changed to end at Elephant Hill Winery. The festival has three main races, the Marathon, Half Marathon and the 10km run. The group I was running with had a running in each race, with myself taking the most difficult option of the 10km race.(Maybe easiest option) This brought with it a hole number of issues in logistics to get people to and from the start lines of each race as each race had a different starting point, with all finishing at Elephant Hill Winery.
Getting to the 10km start left me in the middle of a traffic jam. This is a rural area of New Zealand, so its a little weird to have a traffic jam but due to there only being one way in or out of the area, this was bound to happen. Due to there not being any real movement in the traffic, I decided to walk to the start from about 2km away as there was no way I was going to get to the race on time. I was still late and the race still started on time. I managed to start in the fourth way start, which was about 10 minutes after the start meaning there would be a long run past a lot of walkers to try and get a good time.
I'm not going to dwell too much on this and I see it more of a challenge to get back into a race. I was going to struggle to get a PB on the day, but it was awesome to get into the top 20 on the day for over all times, even after a late start. Constantly running past runners for the entire race was actually good fun(for me), so I could take a lot of positives out of it, especially that I was able to keep a constant pace across the entire distance.
At the end of the day the race was a lot of fun and my girlfriend had a great race for the half marathon and the marathon was a fast and flat day. The race will need to make a few changes to car parks and buses to and from the race as there was a lot of issues getting around. I was thankful the weather was not too bad on the day as this could have been made even worse.
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