North Herts Cross Country

This week was rest week. This means I should feel all refreshed, yes? NO.

I think I have been working a little too hard lately, which means long hours, and shorts night’s sleep. The current job is quite stressful too (soon to change) all meaning I do not have as much time and energy as I would like. All this plus running the business Ryding2Health and you can see why I may run out of energy!

As has become usual, I did my Saturday gym (heavy weights) combined with a long bike ride and was wiped out that afternoon. Hubby was commenting how everything was taking me longer than usual. I came to realise that despite rest week, something had to give because I could not sustain this work volume.

This meant that I decided that I would not run the cross country race this weekend. I would just score, instead of trying to run, AND score, AND fill in team sheets AND collect money.

No. This didn’t go to plan either.

I turned up, (kit with me just in case) to discover that there was only one other woman in our team. We need three. Very quickly I come to realise that to avoid us scoring two lots of penalty points for having runners missing, I needed to run this race. Damn!

To be honest I could not remember the course at all, it had been snowed off for the past few years. I hadn’t even looked at the map. I arrived on the start line feeling decidedly underprepared and decided simply to do my best. That is all I could do.

I ran the race, constantly asking myself was I doing the best I could at the time, focusing on form (ham strings and tree tops!) and doing my thing. Everyone else around me was irrelevant. A girl from another tri club in the league was about, started talking to me, and asked why did we do this horrid thing called cross country... I said this is not a race, this is training. I carried on doing my thing, doing the best I could.

The NLP in me

With around 1.5 miles to go, I could hear a girl some way off behind me. She was talking, between heavy breathing, and a bloke who was passing her encouraged her to ‘catch that girl up there’ meaning me. NOPE I thought, I was a scoring runner for my club and she was NOT HAVING IT! I focussed even more closely, on form, doing the best I could, keeping her behind me. I fully expected her to come past but I worked hard, continued to look forward. I didn’t even afford myself a glance back, I wanted to work on me, my form, and driving forwards. I could hear she was catching me on the uphill but I was losing her on the downhill. All information to help me run as best I could.

I turned at the top of the last hill to see the finish line at the bottom of the hill (a little too far for a sprint finish, and I really didn’t know if my legs had it in them!) I glanced over my shoulder just enough to see if someone was right there, and there was no one. I pressed on, turning up the pace, towards a good strong finish. I crossed the line, proud that I had held her off, and retained my position for that long. I then turned around to apologise and explain that I had decided she was NOT having that position from me, when I discovered she was a WDAC runner, my ex club. Even more satisfying!

Look forwards, focus on yourself and ask yourself if YOU are doing the best you can, and you never know what might be possible.

I just checked out the data, I ran on average a minute a mile faster than I did on the cross country race two weeks ago. RESULT!