Malta marathon

The past couple of weeks had been a real rollercoaster - difficult personal stuff countered by some fantastic progress on promotion of the 10 in 10 and my fundraising. I've got an article in Runner's World (April 2010 edition), a feature on a women's running website (http://www.running4womenmembers.com/public/252.cfm), and received an exicting call from the Square Mile magazine telling me I've been shortlisted under the Sport category for their 30 Under 30 Talent Awards that recognises "ambition and achievement, potential and success of London's new elite" in the City (ok, I'm probably there to make up the numbers). I get to go to some posh awards ceremony to see if I'm one of the 30 winners and it's a great opportunity to get Brathay's name out in a brand new network of potential sponsors.

A horrible stomach bug had knocked me out cold after I got back from Seville and I'd dropped as much as 4kgs in as many days. As most of it was dehydration, I'd recovered most of it, but I was still pretty weak, and the 50 miles of training in the week preceding Malta had left me feeling quite drained. I was looking forward to a road race in the sunshine, but was far from fresh. It's an interesting route - lots of downhills but also several climbs including a long drag at about 18k, plus coming off the top of the island down to the coast means you're running into a stiff headwind for a lot of it. It starts at Mdina by some lovely old buildings and weaves around in a confusing series of wiggles before going down to the bay at Sliema. It was so confusing that the lead car took the front two runners the wrong way. After 7k, the runners realised they'd gone wrong (they shouldn't be lapping people so soon) and tried to get back on track. By 25k, they still hadn't been able to find the route so dropped out and were understandably fuming. It's a real shame as it's terrible PR for the marathon and the race director; I hope it doesn't put top runners off the race as, otherwise, it's a very well organised and slick event.

The first 10k has a series of truly exhilarating downhills and P and I threw caution to the wind and flew down them, to the point where I almost clocked a 10k PB and was on course for a 3'20 finish. Oops. Still, I wasn't after anything other than a sub 4 so it was nice to be reckless and enjoy being a kid for a while. He drifted off after about 40 minutes which let me ease off, a little bit, but now I was getting competitive. If I'd run a sub 3'45 at this race last year, it would have clocked me a top 10 ladies' finish, and there weren't that many girls ahead of me. I could see a pack of 3 though - two who looked good but not too intimidating, and one who looked like a real racing snake. I passed all 3 at about 12k, but Racing Snake took me back within half an hour. That was fine, but I wasn't having the other two pass me again, and somehow I managed to hold off any other girls for the rest of the race.

This meant, of course, that I'd been blatting it so far and running far too hard. It was great fun but bound to end in tears...... I got through to 30k comfortably but from there found I was entirely unable to pick the pace up as I like to do, and in fact was slowing down. No!!! By 35k, I confess there were a few walking breaks, 3 lots of about 100m before I gave myself a kicking. Woeful performance after the victorious finish at Seville. The first couple of hours had gone by in the blink of an eye, the last hour was epic, that's relativism for you. Still, it was lovely and warm by now, about 24 degrees by the finish, and blissful to have the sun on my back again after so long. There was no chance of a sprint finish in the last k along the bay but I came in in 3 hours 43 minutes 40.

The overall time is great given my preparation, though the pacing strategy was terrible. It's another GFA time, and was good enough for 14th lady overall. Of 70, that's not so bad, and it does make me wonder that if I focussed more on speed, less on numbers and mileage, and turned up to a marathon with a taper and ran as disciplined a race as Seville, how much better I could do. Still, speed isn't the goal at the moment and I do enough of these things to be extravagant every now and again, and I was happy to pay the hitting-the-wall price for caning all those fabulous downhills. I just need to avoid doing it in important races!