Liverpool Women's 10K: race report

First of all a big 'Thanks' to everyone who posted messages to my blog or Facebook regarding last weekends race results!!

Feeling tired after a busy day in the office, so will keep the report fairly short.

The plan was to run yesterday's race as training for Sunday's Chester 1/2 marathon, but because of the good result on Friday and the excellent weather conditions, I decided to start at the front (I love fast starts!) and see what happened.

As usual, the commentary from Alan Jackson, BBC Merseyside sports commentator, was excellent. He announced me together with some of the top runners as one to look out for and as "Nathalie Rees come over especially from Belgium", which was so funny as some of the ladies at the front started looking at me. So this was extra motivation to show I could at least follow the pace for the first couple of hundred metres!

This is what I did and as you will from the photos in one of the previous posts below. As the first kilometre as downhill and I could follow one of the better ladies, I managed to clock 4'04" for the first km. After that I slowed down but still managed to run as fast as Christleton and only had to slow again at 3km and completely at 5km. I slowed to 9-10km/h at about 5km so my daughter Rebecca could hand me a sports drink and also because my breathing by then was all over the place because of the speedy start. My Garmin shows speeds of 19km/h at 200m, 15km/h at 600m and again 17km/h at 1.5km.

The hardest part was between 5-7.5km but managed to speed up again just before the 8km mark and settled behind a Penny Lane Striders runner for the last 2 kilometres. This certainly helped me to get my new PB of 46'07" and I know that it will probably be sometime before I better this one! Certainly with the marathon training over the summer. So who knows, it might be next year's Women's 10K! Unfortunately the Asics Liverpool 10K on 4th October is only 2 weeks after the marathon.