Turkey Trot

This was the 10th race out of 12 on our club's winter calendar and one of two in which the winner is the person who finishes closest to their estimated time.

I made sure I arrived in time to get a reasonable warm up as I was feeling a bit stiff. I didn't put an estimated time down until I'd been around the block a couple of times to try and gauge how well I would be able to walk. I was feeling like 31:30 was all I was capable of but in every one of this type of race I have walked faster than my estimate so wrote down 30:43.

It was a clear, still morning. The race follows the coastline from Island Bay to the far end of Lyall Bay, near the airport runway. It is very scenic and in my experience the hill at Houghton Bay makes for a faster time as you pick up speed coming down off the hill.

On my first step of the race I felt a pull in my left quadricep. That is unusual - I don't usually feel my quads at all but it wasn't surprising to feel different muscles whilst I'm working on changing my technique. After around 500m only Andrew and Peter were in front of me. Andrew's estimate was about a minute quicker than mine so I wanted to stay about 200m behind him. I hadn't seen Peter's estimate. I was working quite hard and my legs felt pretty stiff. I felt I was walking around the pace of my training session yesterday (6:45 min/km) so I kept giving it as much as I could. David Lonsdale, our A grade judge, made a special effort to come across and tell me to tuck my butt under so that was a good indication that my technique wasn't looking too flash. (He told me afterwards that he would have given me a red card if we were judging today's race)

When we got to the Lyall Bay straight I tried to speed things up a little but I really flagged about 200m from the end. Digging deep, I gave it one last spurt to the finish line, convinced my time would be over 31 min. I continued walking for a few more minutes then had a sneak peak on the results sheet at my time. I was about 1:15 too fast - my time was around 29:30. I was so shocked I didn't note the exact time.

The race was aptly named - it was Terri the Turkey out there today. I should have paid more attention to technique as I said yesterday that I would. That would have slowed me down a little and I may have gone closer to my estimate. My quad muscle is quite sore and I will have to give it some careful looking after for the next week if I want a good performance in the Road Champs.

What a turkey!