Run > Race

Cardiff Christmas Classic Indoor 3000m. After a stressful weekend/morning, I wasn't in the mood to drive to Cardiff to do this, but I didn't want all the training to go to waste. I was originally in heat 6 of 7, but they reduced it to 6 heats and that messed up my warm-up by making me rush it - although I had plenty of time in the end. There were 15 of us in our race, plus some much faster runners that should have been in heat 5, but they messed up the start list, so 4 of us (including me) weren't assigned to a heat. I started at the back and felt quite comfortable/smooth for the first couple of laps, hitting moreless exactly 10 10-minute pace - my goal was as close to 10 as possible, hopefully under 10.10. I reached 1km in about 3.21, but soon started to struggle. I found myself leading a few runners, including Simon Anderson (who I hadn't seen for years) but the few runners that I was chasing moved away and I didn't feel I had the pace to stick with them, so I found myself running my own race until the final few laps. I got lapped by some of the faster runners, including a very speedy M60! I had a little race with another runner who passed me with about 400m to go. I stuck with him until the bell and then used my finishing speed to finish ahead (by 0.26 seconds).