I raced twice in August, they were both beach races and both went pretty well. The first was in Urbanova, a small village on the beach about 10 minutes drive outside of Alicante city. The course was fairly tough since it was largely on soft sand so the times were pretty slow, the winner averaged 4:17 min/km whereas in the previous beach race he was doing around 3:30. In my case I slowed from 4:17 min/km to 5:04, but I improved to 28th place (of 152) from 39th (of 137), I was pleased with the improvement, a guy that finished just behind in the previous beach race came home 90 seconds behind me in Urbanova.
The following week was another beach race, this time in Playa de San Juan, its about 5 minutes drive from Alicante but in the opposite direction to Urbanova. San Juan is a town in its own right, with a good mix of residential blocks and hotels, its a touristy place but it doesn't seem to attract the ugly side of tourism. The race was much bigger than the previous two beach runs, this one has been going for twenty years now and attracted as many as 374 runners. This time the race was almost completely on hard sand so it allowed for much quicker times than in Urbanova, it was a 7km race and my average pace was 4:09 min/km. Looking at the results now it seems a bit disappointing, the same guy that I was pleased to beat by 90 seconds a week earlier came home only 3 seconds behind me at this one, however given events before the race I should be happy with it. I travelled to both Urbanova and San Juan on bike, while in Urbanova I'd arrived in plenty of time for San Juan I had underestimated how long it would take to get there and parked my bike up with only 10 minutes to go to the start of the race and I still had to get my running number and drop off my bag. Rushing about to get my number and get to the start I turned over my ankle slightly, after an initial worry that I'd got out of bed early and rushed to get to the race only to injure myself I calmed myself and found that I could still run ok, it just felt a little....weird. Anyway I went down to the start, took the first couple of kilometres fairly easy but after that I was confident that the ankle wasn't going to give out so got to running normally. Given that little episode I can be reasonably happy with my performance, I was 47th overall and 13th in my category (of 58).
The race in San Juan was five weeks ago now, since then I've had no more races but I've been doing plenty of training. The University reopened on the 1st September which meant I could get back to track sessions and the occasional session of flapping about in the pool and it seems progress is being made. Last week I did a 10km training run pushing pretty hard and managed for the very first time, in training or in a race, to run 10km in less than 40 minutes, I had 15 seconds to spare. It has been a target I've been aiming for for a while and it was a relief to finally get there, now to reach other goals! Next week I'm doing a 10k race in my home town, I hope that in a race situation I'll be able make a big dent into that PB. Progress has also been made towards the 3 minute kilometre, I produced a table with pb's for various distances upto 1km a couple of posts ago, it needs a couple of updates:
| Desired Pace | Current Times | |
| 100m | 00:18 | 00:15 |
| 200m | 00:36 | 00:32 |
| 400m | 01:12 | 01:12* |
| 500m | 01:30 | 01:32dh |
| 800m | 02:24 | 02:35 |
| 1km | 03:00 | 03:20 |
The * indicates a PB since the last update. I managed to get my PB for 400m to be exactly on 3:00min/km, and it is a performance I have repeated a couple of times now, while at the last update I reported the 200m PB, well I've been able to repeat that time fairly consistently in my last few sessions. The other change from last time I included this table is that I've added a time for 800m, it's 11 seconds outside my target pace but I've repeated the performance a few times and I'm confident with a few more tough sessions I'll be able to go quicker. I haven't tried to run a quick kilometre for a while, I'll do a few more sessions of series before I see how far I've come but looking at my 800m time I'm confident I would be able to go quicker than 3:20 right now.
After lots of positives I have one negative to report. On Thursday I made a long awaited return to football, a full 5 weeks after my previous game but again it caused problems with my back. During most of the game I was fine, but in the last five minutes I felt a pain, but on the plus side I noted exactly the movement I was doing to cause the problem. I was playing on the left and through most of the game when I had the ball I attacked on the outside, however with five minutes to go I saw space on the inside so went for it and that's when I felt the pain. In summary, it's a problem that occurs when I transfer my weight quickly from my left to the right. I'm going to take a break from football for a while now, hopefully with more time in the pool the muscles in my back will get stronger and balanced, so when I do play again I don't have to worry about it.
I think that's everything covered. I have a race on the beach tomorrow and the 10k in my town next week so I'll be back soon with further updates and to discuss my schedule for the year, with the big question being will I or won't I run an autumn marathon.
Until then, happy running!
