Believe it or not, I had never entered a proper cross country race before this event. Never did it at school – I was a sprinter and jumper – and although I have coached a kids’ primary school cross country team, and done lots of trail races myself, this was still a new experience for me: a bona fide club cross country event, laps around a park, and part of a league.
One of the reasons I have never done this before is that my club – Wakefield Triathlon – has struggled to get a place in the oversubscribed West Yorkshire league. It was only this year that some bright spark had the idea to approach the South Yorkshire League instead.
So now I am in a park in Sheffield, running up a steep hill and cursing.
There was a small contingent from Wakefield who had made their way down the M1, and we gathered near the start as the kids’ races were finishing up. The women were due to race at 1200, and the men at 1230, so we got to see the women set off and run immediately up the long grass bank to our left. Judging by their faces when they got back to us after the first lap, it wasn’t the only hill on the course.
In cross country in England, the women are not allowed to run as far as men because of something to do with wombs and periods and… oh I don’t know you’ll have to ask England Athletics. Seems a bit stupid to me, especially as I know about three hundred women who are better runners than I am, but that’s a debate for another time.
The point is that we got to see the women finish their race before we gathered on the start line. There seemed to be a good mix of runners on the line, lots of Sheffield and Barnsley clubs represented. A few very obvious racing snakes at the front of the pack, but a reassuring number of runners as keen as I was to position themselves towards the back of the scrum. I was chatting to Martin Brown at the start, and we were almost taken unawares by the starting pistol – an actual starting pistol – that got us all moving.
After no more than a hundred metres of shuffling along, we immediately hit the hill. It turned out that the lap was a game of two halves… the first 800m or so was all uphill. A long, steep grass bank from the lowest point in the park to the highest. I was very cautious on my way up on this first lap and allowed people to overtake me without resistance. Long way to go and, unlike most other people, I hadn’t been arsed to do a recce lap so I didn’t know what was to come.
After the top of the hill was a 1.2km run around the perimeter of the park. It took us back to the bottom but it wasn’t a straight descent – there were a couple of teasing ups between the downs, and even the descending was either so steep that you had to turn your legs over like mad to keep upright, or not steep enough to feel like a descent as we pushed forward.
My heart rate had hit threshold before I reached the top of that first climb, and it would stay there till the finish line.
As we started the second lap, I was conscious that Martin was on my shoulder, so I had my own competition to work on, but as soon as we hit that climb for the second time, it all got very serious. My heart was already pounding as we started to go up, and I had a moment of realisation that this was going to be a very tough day at the office.
As well as pacing myself carefully up the hills, I made an effort to run “over the top.” There’s a temptation to really ease off after a big effort, but I tried to keep pushing and just allow the effort level to restabilise at threshold rather than going easy.
This reminded me of some of the threshold work we did on the turbo last winter. We had replicated a team pursuit, with a four minute threshold effort, each taking it in turns to give a fifteen second burst of power before not relaxing but returning to threshold. Maintaining that discipline after an effort is really hard.
It was here where I overtook people. Not on the climbs, but in the minute or so after the climb was finished.
On the third lap, about half way around, I heard the rapidly approaching breath of the leader, who sprang past me on his way to the finish line, and I ended up being lapped by five or six more finishers, but generally I was happy with how competitive I was, in the thick of the pack, and not feeling that I was just making up the numbers.
I’d had a vague notion of upping the pace for the last lap, but of course the lap started with that god-awful climb – muttering, “Fucking Sheffield” under my breath as I wheezed up it – so I just did what I could, but I certainly put in a bit more effort for the last (predominantly downhill) kilometre. As we approached the finish, I pulled up alongside a Barnsley Harrier. He responded with an acceleration and so we ended up sprinting to the line. I won the battle but it was a pyrrhic victory as it nearly killed me. Still, in cross country, every place is a point, right?
We have three more races in the series this winter, and I am really looking forward to them. This was a really tough race, but a great experience and another new dimension to my training that I think will help me build towards next year’s very different goals.