Hunter Valley Wineries running festival

Today was a pretty big day as my planned schedule was;

• 3hr ride early morning - 5am
• 10km running race as 40 min pacer at 9:30am
• Kids netball gala day all day afterwards until 3:30pm
• Bedtime at 8:30pm!!

I hit the snooze button a couple of times prior to my run as I was a little tired!

So I only managed 70km and 2:37hrs, bit I wanted to remain reasonably fresh for the run. Nothing major to report on for the ride, only that it was just and aerobic ride and the last shorter ride on a weekend for a while. I need to start hitting some 4-5hr rides from here on in.

The race I was pacing promised to be a slight challenge as the course is quiet hilly with a mix of road, trails and grass sections. When I was announced as the 4 min pacer there was quiet a bit of chuckling as this run mainly had your non serious runners in it, due to the fact there was a half marathon on the same event but earlier on and the more serious runners were in that I think.

However there were a few people looking for a good result and I looked forward to helping out.

The course has a big hill at the 1km mark which I could only manage a 4:20 km and unfortunately I dropped pretty much everyone and was in 4th place! From there on I had maintain a solid clip to make up the time and prepare for the last couple of slower km's which had some hills also. In addition to the challenging course it was actually long, at 10.3km which the event organizers knew and still wanted me to finish in 40 mins, so that meant that I had to run 3:53min/km's and this is what really made people struggle to keep up that pace I believe. But for me it felt really good and comfortable on the flats, but due to my fatigue the hills were definitely a challenge!

So basically I ran the event on my own which was a little disappointing as I was looking forward to helping people pace to a good result but the runners in the event were't quiet up to that pace I guess.

I came in 4th which is rare for a pacer!

So from there I quickly changed and then headed to the netball, getting home that afternoon at 5pm and pretty well knackered! 

I'm very much looking forward to my rest day tomorrow!