It was 4 weeks since ‘blistergate’ in Berlin and it was time to get back on a horse, any horse will do. Right after the Berlin 1/4 marathon, I retreated to the hedonistic sanctuary of Cyprus with the other half Elena who coincidentally is from Cyprus. Walking on the blisters was real struggle for the first few days but was cushioned by the 31 degree heat and cocktails. Once that affliction subsided, the upper chest pain became the new big issue. The wallop I had taken in the toll booth on the way to the airport was now taking its own toll. It was basically a repeat of the rib incident and I was utterly useless for the week. Getting up, opening a door, tying my shoelaces and all of the basic movements we take for granted were extremely painful. In the end it was really no harm being in Cyprus where lying vertical in the sun was just about all I could accomplish. Running was out of the question so I simply submitted to it all, I ate and I drank and I worshipped the sun and I had my fun.
I landed back in Dublin on a Monday morning and reality started to hit home. It’s cold. I should probably go for run. I didn’t want to put all of that good marathon training to waste and figured I’d be still able to put together a good cross country season and some shorter road races. My first order of business was to stop off in the Phoenix park and to just go for a run, any distance will do, just run. So I laced up, with some difficulty, and then I trotted down the North Road toward Chesterfield avenue. Within minutes I had encountered internal resistance. No, said my chest, we’re not doing this today. The pain was bad, every step felt like it was doing some sort of damage. My chest just felt like one giant bruise. I was hoping it was purely muscular but I couldn’t be sure, the chest is such a sensitive area and I just didn’t want to risk it. I had taken the bang almost 2 weeks previously so it was starting to get a little worrying. I cut it short after a mile and meekly retreated to the car for the long drive back to Cork, but it wasn’t all bad. I enjoyed a nice bag of Keogh’s crisps and after being abroad for so long, they really hit the spot. The next day I went to the doctor in work, who at this stage must be thinking ‘what is up with this fella’. A few weeks ago you bruised your ribs on a table while turning on a lamp and now you’ve managed to injure your upper chest leaning out of a car window at a toll booth. I’m putting you on my disaster list. The diagnosis was thankfully the same as the ribs, nothing dangerous in there and just pure muscular damage. He offered me some delicious pain relieving drugs but I declined. The pain is there for a reason so I’ll let it tell me when it’s properly healed. In the meantime he said that light running would be ok, despite the pain so that was a little bit of music to my ears.
I promise I’ll get to Galway. The day after the doctor, I was a little more confident running through the pain but I went for a couch-2-5k sort of approach, a run-walk effort alternating every 5 minutes or so. It was quite nice actually though it was possibly my slowest 5 miles ever in 55 minutes. I was back on the horse for the rest of the week and managed to get through a grass session at the Farm that Saturday. On the Sunday I got 15 miles in, still in discomfort but managing. The next week was a good 70 mile week with a tempo/hills session, another grass session at the Farm and a solid 2 hour run on Sunday at 6:37 mile pace. I wasn’t feeling fit like I had before the marathon but clearly I hadn’t gotten very unfit either. It had been 2 months since I last raced at the Mooreabbey 10 mile in August. I decided I needed to race so I entered the Streets of Galway 8k which was on the following week. As a club, we were all targeting the Munster senior cross country team title the week after Galway so this was a good opportunity for me to enter the cauldron of pain again and get a little hardened before that. Cross country was undoubtedly going to be harder than a road race in Galway. The Streets of Galway is a race I was well aware of, it has a great history, always draws a strong field and I wasn’t really up to much that weekend so I booked a little hotel in Oranmore and I was set. On the week of the race I did a decent session on the Tuesday, 5 x 1km in 3:05-08 followed by a strong tempo at around 5:15 pace. This was decent and gave me good confidence for Sunday.
Race day arrived and it had been an abysmal weekend of weather. The wipers were on overdrive on the journey up on Saturday. I stopped off in Limerick for some lunch and I’ve never experienced Limerick so depressing and it’s not fair on Limerick, it was gushing rain and the wind was noticeably sideways. Not pleasant. I did have the nicest pizza in Ireland though on Saturday night, in Dough Bros. in Galway city. Unreal. All I knew about Sunday morning is that the wind was still going to be sticking around, and it did. It was extra windy. Despite that, the sky was blue and the sun was out and that was a pretty pleasant surprise after a pretty disgusting night. I parked about 2 miles away from the start line and that was no coincidence. There was no way I was driving the car into the city centre on race morning so I parked it exactly one warmup away. This worked out very well. I got there nice and early and there was a lovely buzz around the place. Just under 1000 people showed up for this which was certainly the biggest race I’ve attended post Covid, if you can consider Covid something of the past, which I don’t think you can. You know what I mean. There was a lot of people. There were also a lot of what look like very good runners around, based on their strides and swagger. I knew one of the guys, Niall Shanahan of Limerick, who is on my list of people to catch but other than that I didn’t recognise anyone. Clubmate Lizzie Lee was hovering around the start line also and I already knew she had the win in the bag, lucky Lizzie.
This was an 8k, which is an odd distance but not really that odd, it’s quite even. It’s odd in the sense that there are very few of them and most people don’t talk about an 8k PB, rather a 5 mile PB. 8k is 4.97 miles but who really cares. I suppose it’s a consequence of caring about PBs and times, an affliction of epidemic proportions for the current running generation obsessed with metrics. And I’m not innocent either. It’s not that times weren’t important in the past, they were, but they were lower in the priority queue. Racing and beating people was the priority and good times just happened. I should really remind myself of that more often. Anyway, despite all the talk of not worrying about times, my 5 mile PB was 24:37 so in my wisdom I figured I’d be able to get pretty close to that.
Mile 1 – 5:04
My plan was to run around 5 minute mile pace early on and see what happens. I kind of know what 5 minute effort feels like by now so I didn’t need need to be watch watching. I didn’t need to, that doesn’t mean I didn’t. The optimistic side of me was talking about picking it up then for the last few miles. The course looked reasonable and I knew with the wind direction that we’d be facing into it for the first few miles and once we hit Salthill, it would be pushing us home, aggressively. Once the gun went, a group of 5 boyos quickly developed a close friendship and bolted as a unit, a fast unit. I honestly just didn’t have the drive or motivation to go with them, I was already feeling effort with the pace I was running and this was only minutes into the race. I was a rusty krusty. I just sat a few meters behind, pretty much solo already and feeling that this was going to be a pure slog of a day. By the time I hit the first mile, one of the 5 had come right back to me and the other 4 were looking strong yet a gap was growing.
Mile 2 – 5:01
It was quite windy at the start and not just weather windy but street windy, as in wine-dy. There were quite a few sharp turns through the city centre but eventually in the 2nd mile it started to straighten out. This straightening out did little to help my race. I was working way harder than I thought I should be but I was after moving into 5th and so I just watched the fantastic four stretch away into the distance. I kind of knew then that I wouldn’t be seeing them again. By the end of the mile I was now running head first into the wind, my entire mouth ballooned with the west coast gusts but that’s possibly an exaggeration. Effort was rising and ambitions lowering. 5th is ok isn’t it?
Mile 3 – 5:14
The wind deviously combined with a sneaky drag to make my life that little bit more miserable. That’s silly really, I wasn’t that miserable. In hindsight it’s a privilege to be out there and coming 5th on a middling day. I should be thankful for the misery. Given the long straight in front of me, I was able to observe a lone soldier after getting detached from the fantastic four which now became the terrible three as they geared up to battle it out for the podium spots. I wanted to be with the terrible three, one of which was Niall, but I wasn’t. Not today. I felt maxed out and stuck in one gear, possibly even going down gears. Detached 4th guy was maybe 30 seconds ahead of me and no doubt coming back but then again I was also going back. Still, I had reasonable aspirations of reeling him in over the last 2 miles.
Mile 4 – 5:11
I took a sharp turn and was now heading on a slight downhill towards the Salthill promenade, the promised land of tailwind where thing would get better, wouldn’t they? I was after hitting 5k in about 15:55 but I was also now dealing with a fairly annoying side stitch and my injured chest was causing me additional pain. It was all just about tolerable but not very pretty. Pain was quite popular with all of my body parts in this stretch but I feel it was a necessary pain to get used to racing and hurting again. The stitch didn’t last for too long but even when I hit the promenade at 3.5 mile and had an aggressive yet beneficial wind on my back, I just couldn’t kick on. The gap from myself to 4th was just the same and almost resigned myself that I wasn’t catching him at this stage. All I was fighting for was preserving 5th and getting home without throwing in any towels.
(almost) Mile 5 – 4:55
I did get going a little bit in this mile in that it was quicker than my previous two miles but this was probably down to the tailwind. It looks good on Strava though. I reckon effort was quite uniformly distributed over the whole race. One big long exhausting unspectacular effort. I really don’t have much to say about this mile, I was completely isolated and just going through the motions. It was getting warm too as the midday sun beamed down on us meaning my brow was very sweaty. There was some warm support out on the final stretch and I even got a “Go on Liffey Valley” shout from a middle aged man which was appreciated if a little inaccurate. I even managed to hear his wife tell him “It said Leevale” and then I still had time to hear him say “Oh sorry, go on Leevale”. How I managed to hear that whole conversation is beyond me. The finish line, that delicious finish line was visible for a lot of this mile, mocking me from afar. Eventually I had the last laugh, I think, when I crossed it in 25:27. When I crossed, the clock read 24:27 and I was half thinking had I really underestimated my run but unfortunately not, the clock was lying by exactly one minute. I was pleased enough with the run. Not shambolic, not terrific, just grand. I was just very happy to be done.
All in all, an enjoyable trip up to Galway. I’m at the point where I’ve realised that the majority of races I do are just ok. That’s maybe down to high expectations but more than likely, it’s just life. You win some and you lose most. The good days, the wins and the PB’s are the 1 in 10 races and I’m fine with that. You just need to keep showing up, striving for consistency and simplicity and trusting in the process. This was just another step in a long journey and when I look at it like that, it was completely worth it. Once again the journey back to Cork was comforted with a salty bag of Keogh’s crisps and a bottle of banana Yazoo, firmly establishing themselves as a staples in my diet. You see not only do you get a race reports here but the nutrition advice is indisputable.
Summary: 5th in 25:27