Tour of Clydeside – Kilbarchan Cyclepath

13th August 2012

Results | Garmin track | Photos

My 4th Tour of Clydeside in a row, and a good turnout of 50 runners for the first race in the series.

The format of the race quickly settled into Thomas McDonald and Steven MacGregor setting the pace, and Paul Carroll, Chris Moses and myself giving chase. I tried not to over-cook it to the halfway point, but when I turned at 15:35 it seemed pretty inevitable that I’d get caught by Paul and that Chris was now too far in front to chase. On the run back I was just waiting for Paul to pass, and wishing he would get on with it, but the nearer we got to the end the more I thought I could possibly hold him off.

As we approached the penultimate railway bridge I started to the ramp up the pace, and realised that I was now starting to catch Chris Moses. I knew that the next time my Garmin would bleep would be 8km, meaning that there would be just 800 metres remaining, so I braced myself to charge down Chris from 800m out. With about 400m to go I caught and passed him, but he didn’t give up without a fight, and came back at me. So I needed to speed up again, but I still couldn’t drop him, so finally I had to do whatever it took to stay ahead, which was fairly uncomfortable and virtually sent my heart rate off the scale.

The end result being that I finished 3rd, in a time 1 second faster than last year.