Soundtrack to this post.
Who gets a cold in August? Me, apparently.
Wednesday, three days out, I woke up with that first sniffle that you know is going somewhere bad. By Thursday I was fully snotty and sneezy, and Friday wasn’t much better. I very nearly pulled a sickie from work. Then it occurred to me that phoning in sick on Friday and then bragging about a 10K on Monday wasn’t a good look, so I persevered instead.
I don’t get colds. I’ve always thought I had a strong immune system, right up until I got diagnosed with MS and started to wonder if that same immune system turning on itself was the reason I got MS in the first place. And the medication I take for it works by knocking back part of that immune system on purpose. So I looked it up, and it turns out that’s not just me being dramatic: picking up more colds is a known side effect of the drug. Which was a strange thing to make peace with three days before a race.
Anyway. The cold had cleared by the time I woke up on Saturday morning. Lucky.
I got to Bellahouston Park in good time, picked up my number, took the obligatory daft photo with the sign, and then had about forty minutes of standing around trying not to think about it too hard.
I’ve written before about why I signed up for this one at all and how I built the plan to get round it: run nine minutes, walk one, repeat, and don’t chase anybody in the first kilometre. Two laps of the park. I knew the plan. I’d tested the plan all week. Standing at the start line a minute before the start, none of that made me feel any less nervous.
The start came. I stuck to it. First lap felt exactly as easy as it was supposed to.
Nobody warned me about the hill just after the start line. It’s nothing on lap one, legs fresh, you barely notice it’s there. On lap two, with five kilometres already in my legs, it was a different story entirely. That hill, second time round, was the closest I came to just stopping and walking the rest of the way in. I didn’t. I put my head down, shortened my stride, and got up it.
After that it was just a case of holding on. The last kilometre or so I ran the whole thing in, no more walk breaks, because by that point stopping felt harder than not stopping.
Official chip time: 1:06:05. My phone had me at 1:06:29, so somehow I ran faster than I thought I did, which has never happened to me before and may never happen again.
None of this happens without Stephanie. This whole thing was her idea, not mine. I wasn’t sure about it when she first suggested it, if I’m honest, ten kilometres felt like a lot to sign up for off the back of nothing. She talked me into it anyway, and then she stood in the cold at the start line at half past nine on a Saturday morning to see me off, and was there again at the finish.
And here’s the thing: she’d picked up my cold off me the day before. So the woman who talked me into this stood outside in August, unwell, to cheer on someone who was only running because she’d talked him into it. I’m genuinely glad she pushed me into this, because I’d never have signed up for it on my own.
Three months ago I couldn’t run for three minutes without stopping. Today I ran ten kilometres. Whatever comes next in the run-up to Paisley, I’ll take that.