Oxford City Race, Mens Vets (course 2).
10th/64 Mens Vet, 11th/90 on the course
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ouoc/cityrace/2016/results/...Had a bad night of sleep so overslept, and late for my start again! Lucky that I did not consider this a target race, and with the last two weeks erratic training it was always going to be a write-off from a speed perspective. I was hoping to be in a better place mentally though, rushing did not help at all there. Not a huge amount of chance in the courses for mistakes, most of it was fairly simple with the majority of opportunities for mistakes being route choice ones. Now - wherever there was a chance to make mistakes, about 50% of the time I did make them. Starting with one for #1 which I overran - then several sub-optimal routes in the tricky areas.
My lack of focus is best illustrated by the long leg that happened to mostly coincide with the route I had to take from where I parked to the assembly - I did see many fellow runners going down there incl. Richard so I knew I was going to have to go there. And so when I ran the leg, I have no idea how I ran past that street and ended up taking a longer route around... Looking at the splits and thinking through the routes about 3m timeloss, of which about 35s is a navigational mistake to 1, the rest is route choice, is about right. Many of those route choices consisted of safe/easy route choices which were as a result of oversimplifying the route so that I can concentrate on running - clearly it does not pay off in this environment. Without those mistakes, but not accounting for hesitations etc. and with current speed then, 4th place would have been a realistic aim. The 3 guys at the front of the field have speed that is just not within my current capabilities (which I knew anyway).
At least there were sections where my speed was OK, so I can take away some positives in that respect - this race would in fact be the starting point of making a comeback into reliable running to kick off the winter training (well not fully, that will come after next weekend). There.