Roscon 10K, marathon training and other stuff

It's been some time since I've written a post for the website, but it's also been some time since my last race. I've had a few, but nothing noteworthy. I've been training for the Barcelona Marathon at the end of March, so for once I actually feel like I'm doing some proper running preparation, as opposed to sporadic sessions at half six in the morning before work. Quite surprisingly, training has been great fun, and even more so is the fact that I don't feel too shattered, with the exception of Mondays of course. Since the end of December I've been doing regular 2:30-3 h runs at the weekends and yet my legs still feel quite spritely during sessions, so I was looking forward to this 10K to get a feel of how well training's been going.

I'd been well-warned by locals not to expect a PB if it was a normal January day in Zaragoza. The cold and windy weather really bites here in the winter months and, as I've been discovering, seriously slows you down at times. The 10K race route takes in a great open stretch of the River Ebro and crosses one of the fancy new bridges built for the 2008 Expo so that the course winds up in the Luis Bunel Water Park. This leaves runners fully exposed when the wind blows. And of course it did. Not the worst I've experienced, but enough to slow my target pace of 3.30 min/km down to 3.45 and even 3.50 at the most exposed parts. There's not much else to say about the race except that I started well, felt comfortable most of the way, overtook a few folk in the first few kms and held my place from 3-8 km; although I dropped two places towards the end. All in all a fine race and I was pleased to finish 12th in 36:20, despite this being a good 50 secs below my target time!

In many ways the following day was more interesting. I'd heard news of a new 50 km race taking place in June in the Montes Blancos just outside of the city. More or less every direction out of Zaragoza leads you to some sandy 300-400 m-high white hills covered in bristly bushes and spiky trees. These are great places for training as they're all quite undulating and make for interesting trail runs. However, it turned out that some folk were meeting up to have a look at the first part of the route for the race. So we met up at 7.30am on Monday morning and took the tour which covers 30 km and 400 m total climb. It was nice enough: nice to meet some new runners and see the sunrise in the hills and learn some new training routes, but by all accounts the last 20 km (the second loop) should be the most scenic and involves more ascents. As far as the race itself is concerned, in addition to the 50 km distance, arguably the toughest part will be the starting time of 1pm which means that runners will be racing in heat which is likely to be 30 oC. So although this race seems like fun, I'm going to wait until I tackle the marathon before I make any final decisions on running it.

Hope to have some more race reports soon, it's great reading all the posts. Of course, if anyone has any marathon training and racing tips they'd be greatly appreciated!

Photos

TMT 50K

Posted by Scott Mitchell on Tue 31 Jan 2012 | 5 comments

Category road race