Skip to main content

I Only Did It For The Ice Lolly!

My well deserved ice lolly after a boiling St Albans Half Marathon


I had a busy weekend with my usual 5k Parkrun on Saturday and then the St Albans Half Marathon today. I knew that I needed to save my legs for the race today and so at Parkrun yesterday I donned a Hi-Vis jacket and ran as a 35min pacer. It was the first time I have ever paced a race and so I was pretty nervous that I was going to get it wrong, I must have looked at my phone a hundred times to make sure I was on pace. Unfortunately I hadn’t taken into account the fact that the course always measures slightly over 5k and so I finished at 35:03. Luckily the people who were trying to finish before 35 minutes were in front of me and so still reached their goal. This was a different experience for me but really enjoyable. I talked to a lot of people as I ran around and had lots of people talking about staying with the ‘Pace Lady’! The biggest benefit for me though was given my legs an easy, comfortable run before the half marathon today and making sure I couldn’t get excited and run off too fast. I will be pacing again next Saturday and will make sure I factor in the extra distance and shave off those 3 seconds!

My trendy Hi-Vis!

Today was all about the St Albans Half Marathon and the ice lolly that you received when you crossed the finish line! The weather was perfect as I walked to the start from the car park; cool and breezy. However the clouds quickly parted and the sun shined down brightly on the 3800 competitors who very quickly got extremely hot and sweaty. The first half of the race wasn’t too bad, it was hot and there were a few hills but I was able to run at a decent pace and make the most of the sporadic shaded sections. But shortly after I passed the six mile mark the hills began. Horrendous, steep hills that seemed to go up and up but never come down! At some points I could barely run and did some sort of weird shuffle to keep going telling myself that surely this was the last hill. The last hill did come.....at the 11.5 mile point. By this point my leg muscles were screaming, I was covered in salt from sweat and I smelled worse than the last day of Glastonbury Festival! But I was determined that I was going to keep pushing and used a half mile downhill section to pick up the pace and then continued to push whilst telling myself that I never want to do another half marathon again (I’m doing one on 1st July). But the finish came and I even overtook someone right on the line pretending that I was some sort of Olympic athlete! Ha Ha! Despite the hills and the sun I finished with a PB of 2:02:46. I got my medal, t-shirt and the wonderfully awesome Cola flavoured ice lolly which was the best thing I have ever tasted! That helped a little bit in cooling me down but the running and sun had left me a red faced mess! I then got to enjoy the 1.5 mile walk (uphill) to the car park (they said it was only 10 mins away) and was ecstatic to find that Elaine Paige on Sunday was just about to begin. So I drove home with the windows down belting out show tunes. Perfect!


I only need £235 more to make my goal of £2000. If you can help me reach this total then please visit my fundraising page at:

KM Complete: 202KM
KM To Go: 98KM 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Saturdays = Parkrun

3 Parkruns in a row in beautiful sunshine I have been quiet on the blog front since the Sunderland Half Marathon but I have been quietly adding to my run total by attending Bedford Parkrun every Saturday. The weather has been so good and it has been the perfect way to start the weekend. I am continuing to improve and finally broke the 25 min barrier on Saturday with a PB of 24:36. I even persuaded my friend Amy to come along and join me and she completed her first Parkrun with me three weeks ago. Thank you Amy for joining me! The next few weeks will be a bit more hectic with a Parkrun on Saturday and a Half Marathon or a 10K on the Sunday. This will be the case for four of the next five weekends with a week in Cyprus to relax inbetween. The reason for this is that my overseas deployment was brought forward by six months and so I will unfortunately be leaving the country in the middle of July. This means I have to try and cram in as much as I can before I go as I don’t beli...
Post a Comment
Read more

It was raining.....

I completed the first 5k of my challenge on Saturday at Bedford Parkrun. It was raining....a lot! So I managed to drag my freezing cold and wet behind around the course in 29:24 placing 233rd out of 418. Not my best time but definitely a good place to start. I am planning on doing the Parkrun every month this year and hopefully with some more training and some better weather I will look less of a mess than I do in this picture! Please visit my fundraising page and help support me in this challenge. I am still looking for that first donor to get me started. Will you be the first??   https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/HelenFrancis10
Post a Comment
Read more

Running Down Dementia in the South Atlantic

At the finish of the Stanley Half Marathon (the medals are stuck on a container ship somewhere in the Atlantic) The past few weeks have seen me back racing again for the first time since I arrived in the Falkland Islands in July. It wasn't that I didn't want to race, only that there weren't any races to enter. So with that in mind I decide to create my own running event based on the Parkrun format I have enjoyed in the UK all year. The cost and time of trying to set up an actual Parkrun here is currently prohibitive so I instead created the MPC Run (Mount Pleasant Complex) which entails a 5k run at 0800hrs on a Saturday morning. After snow, sleet and gale force winds, I was praying that the first event on the 6th of October wouldn't be a wash out and I was so happy to wake up in the morning to sunshine and low winds. The race went well with 17 runners and 1 dog completing the course which turned out to be .5km longer than I was expecting (I probably should have...
Post a Comment
Read more