The Ovenden Fell Race
Posted in RunningSome fell races you are flying, hills are a breeze, the legs feel silkly smooth, the downhills are like lightening with no thought, no effort or concern about saftey. You are invincible as you skim across rough ground. This wasn’t one of those races!
Arriving at Ogden Water for the 14th Ovenden Fell Race, I was feeling quite good. My injured foot had been rested well since the Calderdale Relays 3 weeks previous. I had not done any running whatsoever in an aid to sort my foot out (and ensure I could stay drunk throughout Christmas). This I think was my undoing. Going up the first slight incline my legs felt like lead, my breathing laboured. I was just waiting for a bit of flat ground so that I could get some rythem and start pushing forward. Unfortunatly as soon as I hit the flat ground I realised it was going to be a slower race than I anticipated. The legs were still laboured. The ground was frozen as hard as concrete and I was struggling.
At this point I decided not to beat myself up about it and thought of various excuses to my already poor performace. I have settled on two excuses. First is lack of training due to injury, second is that it is better to get the shocking races over and done with early on in the year. Happy with these I settled in and tried to just enjoy it as a training run.
I do belive there were some points that I was enjoying it, unfortunatly these were all too late in the day. Maybe I am just suited to longer races where I can get settled in for the first 8 miles as opposed to the race being 8 miles?
Two worrying things came from this race (apart from the result) first was the foot was in agony the next morning and second was on the final descent I had real trouble catching breath. My chest felt tight and I had to slow down and take big deep breaths to control my breathing. This isn’t the first time this has happened so off to the docs with this one. Still no excuse as this was on the final descent to the finish.
All in all a cracking race, a good course but I felt like I could have done better. Final result 32nd out of 137 in a time of 66.33. Winning time 53.42 by Karl Gray of Calder Valley.
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