Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Croydon on a Sunday

It's the six-monthly Croydon 10k this Sunday, and as it was the very first race I ran nearly six months ago (in a racing career spanning.. months) I couldn't resist entering it again to see if I can do any better than last time. I ran 47:53 in October, have since beaten that with 44:43 at the Serpentine New Years 10k, and might be able to shave a bit off that with a following wind this Sunday. There's something faintly disconcerting about my race number - I've been given number 17 for this one, which to some people may look like a "scary elite runner" type of number (in some races, low numbers are reserved for scary fast people). Fortunately, in my case it just means "seventeenth person to register", and in any case any illusions people might pick up will evaporate shortly after the start.

The organisers have cunningly done their bit to make sure that nobody fails to warm up properly by scheduling the race for a day when there's no service on the Tramlink to Lloyd Park tram stop, meaning that I'll get a nice jog down from East Croydon station in order to be at the start by 1015 and a nice jog back again once I'm finished. Croydon on a Sunday morning is an odd place - almost completely dead other than for the odd straggler crawling home from a night out and the odd early-rising lunatic (often in the literal sense, after my experience of getting to the race last October). Still, the race should be fun provided my knee's stopped hurting by then after a maybe-slightly-too-vigorous outing at a hideously late hour last night.

Finally, take a look at the route profile. I've been trying to work out exactly how a race where the start and finish are in the same place can have a net ascent of 50 metres without erecting an enormous amount of scaffolding or digging a really big hole. Answers on a postcard...