Run where you’re at, not where you want to be

The May Bank Holiday

The wind is at my back. I’m running downhill. And it’s my first race of the year. I want to take off but the handbrake is on.

The Meath Sports Partnership 10 K in Kells, and despite it being a Bank Holiday there is a small but decent sized crowd who have come out for the spin. As I head out of town and into open country I watch almost a dozen runners start to stretch ahead of me at a pace that isn’t that faster than what I know I would have ran last year or the year before that. I can’t help but feel that I want to set off after them. Like a bull held inside all winter and with the wind and the downhill whispering me on, I’m dying to tear away. Except at the back of my mind I know if I do, I will be dying coming back.

The truth is I have yet to put in any real training. So while I would love to be motoring along and chasing a sub 38 time I managed a few years back I’m quite a distance off that, at least for the moment. So if I chase down that time, it will only be for the first few kilometres before inevitably the wheels come off and I spend the final 5 kilometres existing in my own private world of Kells countryside hell. I know this because I have done it on countless other occasions when too impatient to get to old levels I go off too quick.

Instead, I have a new motto, run where you’re at, not where you want to be. And in doing so runners who I might like to run with or ahead of later in the year disappear into the distance and I get to enjoy the country environs of north county Meath without the desire to throw up!

In the end I overtake a few in the final 5 k to finish 5^th in a respectable time of 42.01. On the one hand it is only 30 seconds faster than what I would hope to cover the same distance in a marathon, something that is a little disconcerting when I realise I’d have to add three more 10k and then some! But on the other, it is only May, it didn’t rain and there is a long time left to go before October.