It was my second attempt to attend to Watford 10 km race. Last year, I couldn’t attend due to sickness, but this time I manage to do it even I have a minor leg injury.
The race starts and finished in Cassiobury Park, but many parts of the route are in Whippendell Wood. More about the area can be found here: http://cassioburypark.info/whippendell-wood/. Something I forgot about it is that route is mostly on grassy trails and wild path on woods while I thought it would be mainly on the road 🙂
Condition. The weather was great. It was cloudy, foggy and the temperature was around 9°C. The road condition was very bad. There were many leaves , branches and track was very muddy.
My aim was to run 70 minutes. The problem is that I set this based on the fact it will be flat run on road with 1 hill climb. As you already know it was a bit more challenging.
The route is stunning, and fog adds to the great ambience of this place.
Sadly I didn’t have too much oppotunity to enjoy views as I spent most of the run on surviving unwinnable battle with road condition. I expected mostly run on the road, while most of the race was off-road. It looks like it wasn’t enough challenging for me, as I decided to ran with very old shoes. This allow me to show my impressive figure skating skills on many many occasion. I wasn’t aware of this hidden talent of mine. To make this more challenging this route is quite hilly so you can expect quite a few uphill runs with decent gradient. Honestly? This turns out to be a great fun,I laugh a lot and I didn’t failover!
While I was running, I knew that the finish line would be too muddy for me to do my high-speed finish … but I spotted one place a 1.5 kilometre away when I could run downhill as fast as I can which was fun but scary when I struggle to slow down after that due to slippery road :).
My idea was to run with a specific pace where I can and run safety on the muddy section. Run all uphill until my heart rate hit max and then walk for 30 seconds. Run downhill safety. The strategy worked and achieved my goal of finish race in 70 minutes! Which even more impressive that my aim was set with assumption with running on the road with one hill not running off-road with many hills.
My result was 1.10.12. I ran it in 70 minutes ! My average speed was 8.6km/h and pace was 7 min/km as planned. I was 293 out of 418 runners.
The organisers did a great job. It was a very well organised event. There was a lot of information on the website and emails. On the race, It was easy to get into place, pick up a number and so on. In terms of race, the route had a decent amount sign, marshalls were across the route and gave warning to all areas that were “challenging.” In the end, you got a coffee cup! I like a valuable trophy. We didn’t go for light refreshments as we need to go, so I can’t make a comment. Overall. Great event.
It was challenging race but I had a great fun and a laugh a lot while running. I will try this race next year.
I would like to say thank you to this amazing shoes ! Time to rest in the peace!
I highly recommend this race !
Dominik Symonowicz 