I am very sorry, that this post is so late, I have been pretty busy and sorry for the lack of photos in this post, but I wanted to get a blog over to you this week, so here it is: For most of last week I have been pretty excited for the race last weekend, Kent XC schools. I had never done this race before, well this isn't really surprising considering this is my first XC. As usual I was at school on the Friday and I made my usual carbonara dinner, which was delicious as always and I got in an early night. In the morning I was up by 7:00 doing last minute preparations and also having breakfast. When I got to school breakfast I was glad to see a large pot of porridge and lots of bananas... perfect that was my breakfast sorted. I rolled onto the school coach for 8:30 and soon enough we were on our way down to Dover. Yes, Dover! It seems a bit silly to me, to put a race which all the Kent schools go to, right on the edge of Kent and sadly for us this did mean it took rather a long time to get there. Fortunately 1 hour and 20 minutes later, I could see the sea and the white cliffs of Dover *relieved sigh* we were nearly there! There was lots of chat on the bus, mainly about how there wasn't a piece of flat land in sight. Fortunately when we got to the school we were relieved to see it was a relatively flat course with a few sudden uphills but nothing too major. I set out to walk the course and quickly came to the reality of how frozen the ground was, because I was turning my ankles and I was in my trainers, this did worry me a bit! The course was 2x 2km laps, which were pretty straight forward. The last 200m consisted of a short sharp hill and then a curve around to the finish. After a nice long warm up and many decisions about whether to wear gloves or not, I was standing on the rather packed start line. I was in the senior girls age category, but we were mixed in with the inter girls and there was no way of telling who was who, but luckily, there was quite a large percentage of people I knew in the race from club races. BANG! The race was off, everyone made a sudden sprint and for one moment I thought I was in a 400m race, I saw myself just being over taken by more and more people... this isn't a rare occasion for me at the start! I decided in the first lap I was just going to settle down and get into my rhythm and on the second lap start making my move and catching people. This pretty much went to plan and on the second lap I just started to pick people off and maintain this. Coming into the last 200m a girl was 5m off me so I put in a desperate attempt to catch her and so nearly did, but my legs just didn't have any more in them and I came in 1 second after her. This was very annoying but I could tell that my speed at the end, even though it didn't let me catch her, it has got better.
I was handed my slip of paper with 11th place on, which actually turned out to be 10th as they made a mistake so I was chuffed to have made it in the top 20 to get my place in the inter-counties in two weeks time to represent Kent. Tomorrow I am off to Parliament Hill for the South of England Champs, which I am very excited for! Good Luck to anyone running tomorrow. G x
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HelloI'm Grace, a 18 year old runner, and fitness fanatic. Join me on my crazy journey through life, squeezing in an adventure in every second of spare time I have. Archives
February 2019
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