The Bupa Great South Run 2010

It’s funny how the mind can play tricks on you. A few days before the Great South Run, my local gym was closed after a severe flu bug spread like wildfire, causing most of the staff to call in sick and members to drop like flies. This resulted in the closure of the gym for three days while a mass cleaning operation took place. Many members who hadn’t yet caught the bug began to worry it would eventually reach them and I also began to question whether I would remain germ-free. Cue – the power of the mind. The day before the Great South Run, as my husband and I drove to our hotel near Portsmouth, I began to feel off colour. I felt hot, faint and shivery as we checked into our hotel. My husband Eddie assured me it was my mind playing tricks on me, and he must have been right. After a hearty salmon and pasta meal, washed down with fizzy water and two small glasses of white wine, I began to feel much better. Must have been the wine!After a blissfully peaceful night’s sleep, I was raring to run. The race started promptly at 11.03am. The weather was perfect – cool and a bit chilly, no breeze and blue skies. In fact, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Great South is a fast, flat course, so I had high hopes of completing the ten-mile distance within an hour and 30 minutes. The number of participants was quite incredible – some 23,000 runners took part, including many elite athletes, and there was a broad mix of men and women in all shapes and sizes. The early stage of the course was very cramped, and passing slower runners without jostling them proved to be a challenge. Equally, getting out of harm’s way when speedier runners wanted to pass me was difficult too. The Great South Run is a scenic course, offering a wide range of views and historic sites, including HMS Warrior, HMS Victory and the Spinnaker Tower. However, I managed to run past most of them without really noticing they were even there! I focused on my pace, on weaving in and out past runners, which is far more tiring than running in a straight line, and kept my music on for motivation. I ran with my husband for the first mile, but he was faster than me and gradually we became separated. I could see him further ahead but couldn’t quite catch him without pushing myself harder than I wanted to. By mile five, I felt pretty good, but by mile eight, that familiar nerve pain in my left leg had set in and began to feel stiff and sore. I ignored the pain, deciding that if I did stop and walk for a minute it would be even harder to start running again. By mile nine, as we ran along the seafront, I felt tired and seriously wanted to stop, but that wasn’t an option. The Bupa Boost Zone, where Jelly Babies were being handed out, saved the day. I greedily grabbed a handful and put on the best spurt I could find to the finish line. I completed the race in one hour 27 minutes and two seconds (I won’t fret over the two seconds!). My husband achieved an impressive one hour, 25 minutes and 47 seconds. Men’s Running Editor Danny Coyle also ran swiftly, completing the course in an incredible one hour, 18 minutes and 20 seconds, despite claiming he’d hardly done any training! (Which prompted me to think that a feature on how and why men seem to run faster than women might be worth commissioning!) So much for Girl Power! Joking aside, I felt happy with my time and really enjoyed the run.Afterwards, while my work colleagues tucked in to sausages and mash, I fancied something sweeter and found an ice cream van, where I bought myself a large 99, complete with Flake! Well, I figured I’d burned around 2000 calories so surely I deserved it.The Great South Run offers a good atmosphere, smooth organisation and an appealing course. The only negative is the traffic in and out of Portsmouth – it took us a good hour to escape from the mass of crawling cars. But it was well worth it. Maybe next year it might be time to test out the reliability of the trains on a Sunday!

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Race day saviours:

The song that pulled me through when I struggled:

Not Over Yet – Dance Mix, Mary J Blige

The food that kept me going:

Jelly Babies

The spectator that kept me going:

The wheelchair bound war hero by the side of the road with one leg missing. What could I possibly complain about after seeing him clap and cheer me on?