chasing a kid

No, no, before you get too excited, i don't have a kid along the way. That title just sums up my experience last night running the Lisburn half marathon.

Last night Stanley Kelly, his friend Colin, Allan Massey and myself ran the Half marathon (Stanley and I for the third year running). It is a was a good event, there must have been thousands of people there and the weather was fantastic (not too hot and not too cold).

Well we started off all running together, you know a nice slow pace to get going, you can't take these things to fast at the start or you'll be lying on the concrete by about 8 miles. So we were all together for the first 4 or 5 miles but Massey always seemed to be a step or two ahead of us.

I was thinking this kid doesn't know what he's doing, he wants to take off here but he'll regret it later. Well soon after this massey picked up the pace a bit and so i picked it up with him asuming that Stanley and Colin would do the same.

A few minutes later Massey was about 10feet ahead of me and as I looked back and Stanley and Colin were about 20 feet behind me. No big deal. But... Massey must have been gradually picking up the pace because withing about 5 mins Massey was bout 100m ahead of me and when I turned around to look back I had to run backwords for a few steps to find Stan and Colin. There I see Colin's hand up in the air waving at me from about 200m back.

So here I am stuck in no man's land. Do I slow down and wait for the old boys or do I pick it up and teach this kid a lesson (or so I was thinking)? I knew that Stanley was only holding back to keep Colin company, thats the type of upstanding guy Stan is, so I decided that they were going to run together back there so I might as well catch the free bird ahead of me.

I picked up the pace and within a few mins was slapping Massey's but as I ran past Him.

We both felt pretty good for the next several miles and kept up a fair pace. But the worst was to come for Massey. Foolishly, as so many stupin young guys do, he thought that fashion was more important than function... or maybe he just thought that real running shoes were a silly extravagance, because he was running the race in a pair of those plane white style nike shoes with the baby blue swoosh that so many spides wear with there trackey bottoms. And to top it off they werent even tied up!

So by about mile 8 or 9 his feet were killing. Foolsih kids, when will they learn to listen to their elders. I had been warning him about this for the last couple weeks. Well for the last few miles both his feet were well bruised but to give him credit he ran through the pain. I wasn't sure if he was going to make the last mile as his stride was begining to get a bit akward but he didn't let up.

Just before the 13 mile marker we decided to step up the pace again for the finish line and then with only about 400 m to go we picked it up to as much of a sprint as we could handle.

Well as it turned out, he could handle a bit more of a sprint than I could becasue in the last couple hundred meters he pulled away from me and ended up beating me by about 10 secs.

I finished at 1h 45sec on the dot. One minuite slower than my first one but I'm pretty happy with it for the amount of distance training I had done. The 3 mile runs just don't cut it when your training for a half marathon. oh well... it was great craic.

And i have to give it up to Massey who was the better man on the day, even after only about a half dozen training runs.

Am i alound to blame this one on age...