Again it's been a year.
This blog is getting like one of those fairly dreadful "what's been happening with us" letters that turn up in your Christmas cards. Aimed to make you feel that you've somehow wasted the last 12 months while others have been achieving, well, all sorts.
However, this is a running blog, sort of, and in running I get to achieve stuff still.
So I got to be an MV65, but, other than that, 2020 has been anything other than a normal running year.
I'm, of course, not alone in that!
Here's what it should have been:
January - A repeat visit to Oh My Obelisk to run the trail half marathon
February - The Lytchett 10 in Dorset, British Masters 10 mile road championships.
March - The Bath Half Marathon
April - Zurich Marathon
Depending on the Zurich result I was then going to plan the rest of the racing year, with the serious goals being for speed on the roads.
'A' goal was a lifetime PB at the marathon of 3:45 or better. If that wasn't Zurich in April, the contingency was to be Eindhoven in October.
'B' goal (and the essential for Zurich) was a "Boston Qualifier" of around 3:55
'C' goal, with a similar time goal, but different time frame was to be a London Marathon "Good for Age" qualifier. I could only achieve this after my birthday on October 8th, hence the choice of Eindhoven, the first accessible fast and flat marathon after that day.
So, I went back to Dawlish for the fun of Oh My Obelisk. The course was wetter at the top and I was around 4 minutes slower than last year on the day. In my 65th year, there would be no MV60 win in 2020, but I enjoyed the race, felt in fine fettle and was happy with my time.
Little did I know then that this would be the last actual race for me until 9 months later.
Now it seems a bit ironic that I "lost" both my February and March races, for reasons not directly related to the Covid 19 Pandemic. The weekend of the Lytchett 10 saw the South West of England hit with one of those winter storms that gave us a "you must stay at home" rehearsal. And when it came around to the Bath Half in mid March, I was sure they would cancel (many events already had). Unbelievably, and I think very cynically, they "did a Cheltenham" and brassed it out. I, and many other runners, decided it was not fair to descend on the city of Bath as the hospitals started to fill up. Obviously that's another one off the races to do list as well.
The "marathon year" was well and truly gone, and with it my plans for a return to competitive road running.
Once the pandemic truly took hold, so much else became important, but my running, if that's possible, became even more important. I almost invariably run off road on Dartmoor with my "training partner" dog, Cocoa. To both my cost and benefit, this has made him a very, very fit dog, and without his daily doses of energy burning, his spaniel nature can make him a pestering pain in the arse about the place. Fortunately for both of us, even when the tightest restrictions were in place, our running habit was a permissable activity.
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