Crawley

I was racing up the steep hill in the forest, behind two girls in green tops from the Hayward Harriers. They had just overtaken me at the bottom of the last hill. Now we were five meters into the up slope of the next hill and the girls were starting to feel it. This hill is steep!

They say that it isn't the night before a race which is the most important night for resting, but the night before that. Two nights before I'd been out in Soho, London, with my good friend Toni. We'd started at Trash Palace, which is a gay bar in London. We had a bit to drink there before heading onto the Popstarz nightclub up by Centre Point, where we had still more to drink and danced A LOT. We finally stopped dancing at 3am. I had to go then anyway to get the last train back to home, finally getting home at about 5.30. I think I made about 4 hours of broken sleep before a friend called me up and called me out for lunch downtown. I was feeling a bit fragile, to say the least, but a nice hot bath and along leisurely lunch sorted that out.


I used to work with this cheeky chap, but he left the company so that he could travel. He's been round most of Eastern Europe already, now he wants to go to Africa.

I had a quieter night on Saturday. I stayed in and drank wine, watched DVDs and generally chilled out until about 1 in the morning. I was flipping through this month's copy of Runner's World when I saw that there was another race in Crawley on Sunday morning, billed as the Crawley Saints and Sinners 5+ Mile run, through Tilgate Forest. I had to go. It was not negotiable.

Tilgate Forest is my forest. I've spent enough time in it this year to know the major paths and the major hills, so looking at the route map beforehand I could see what the best strategy for getting round the course would be. I'm also the kind of runner who enjoys running up hills: I love the mental discipline you need to get up then, and I love the careful technical approach that you need as well. To get hills right you need to know when to push yourself, when you are going to recover, what pace to take the hill at, and you really need to be able to force yourself to keep going until you get to the top. It helps a lot if you know how many hills there are and how long they are though.

When I got to the track I was one of only a very few runners not in team uniform, so I was expecting to get my butt kicked by all these team guys. Annoying, but what the heck, I didn't have to worry about siblings, colleagues or friends seeing me coming in right at the end so I figured I could just relax and enjoy the run without worrying about time or position. I started fairly far back in the pack.

Races from the K2 stadium in Crawley quickly get into the forest and you spend the first mile or two mostly trooping uphill. Right from the off I was overtaking other runners who were having trouble getting up the hills or cutting across muddy areas – just like last week, nearly everyone else was running in regular road shoes, which gave me another small advantage.

Of course, it's a bit of fun really, and does nothing more than satisfy my competitive instincts. I got back in 40m 56s. That's 8m 7s per mile. Only three months ago I was finishing 5km races through town at 8m 31s per mile. Longer and harder races at a faster rate – that's not just a bit of fun, that's a genuine improvement in personal fitness**.

That afternoon saw Lewis Hamilton having a similarly good race at Hockenheim in the German GP. The start of the race was uneventful with Lewis way ahead, but a bad call by the team while the safety car was out saw the boy wonder drop to fifth place. Hamilton put in some good, solid laps and made a couple of neat overtakes to get his first place back and win the race – outstanding.

A friend* had sent me a link to s site which had a clever but simple instructions to make a camera mount for a bike, and I just had enough time after the race to rush out to the forest and shoot a couple of clips on it. The films aren't that watchable at the moment – the bike bounces around and swings from side to side so much that it is pretty hard to make out much of what is going on. But I did see four Red Deer in the forest, which was nice. I'll try and make something watchable out of the clips over the next few days, in the meantime here's one I made earlier:



It's a pretty short clip, taken from about 15 minutes worth of clips I'd done that day from around town. I'm wondering if for road biking I could make the films look even faster by mounting the camera lower down.

Anyway, have to rest now. I have work tomorrow


**I weigh myself every day, and in the last week have put on about 1.5 kilos. I think that's because I've gotten myself some extra muscle in my legs from all of the hills in the Adventure Racing the week before.

*A friend from MyOpera, no less!!

Saturday, and one was adventure racing in some forest neat Bracknell, as part of a joint effort with my brother ('Team Low Fliers'). Adventure Racing, of course, is a combination of running, mountain biking, and orienteering, with the occasional other challenge thrown in to make it that little bit more, well, interesting. Some Adventure Races have a kayaking section as well, but not always. Races can go on for several days, although ours was only a quick 5-hour jaunt around the forest. That's not to say that it was easy, it was a pretty intense 5 hours...

Race conditions were pretty warm but wet – we've had some quite heavy rain in the last week, although it only rained for about 20 minutes on the day. We spent a lot of time trying to avoid puddles, not because we were worried about getting muddy but because it is seldom sensible to ride a bike at speed into puddles in a sandy forest. We did pretty well and made each of the 20 checkpoints, but then a navigational frak up on the way back got us pretty lost, and we eventually ended up about three miles away from where we needed to be. It's easy to get lost in the forest. Luckily we were on bikes, so we raced back (technically illegal to race on public roads in the UK) and made it through the gate with five minutes to spare.

Most of the checkpoints are just little stamps with which you punch distinctively patterned marks into your scorecard, but five of the checkpoints had extra challenges on them. Mostly they were pretty simple things like cross a rope bridge, carry a bucket without spilling the contents, follow a rope blindfold and walk on these big skis for 20 meters. One checkpoint – checkpoint E – had us walking through a waist deep pond carrying our bikes. You didn't have to carry them out of the water but most people did.... it sounds really horrible, and although the water was dark it wasn't cold, and there wasn't much in the way of undergrowth. It was pretty easy to get across, and not altogether unpleasant.

All in all we had an awesome good time, and I'm planning on entering a second one later on this year, either at the end of August or beginning of September. Not sure yet if my brother will come or if I'm going solo...


And that would be me by my bike, wearing one of our v. cool home made t-shirts.

I crashed once during the race. We came down a hill pretty fast, and then noticed a big puddle at the bottom. Dave went round it to the right, and I went to the left, aiming for this little track which I'd seen. I noticed too late that it was a tractor track, a deep, steep-sided puddle created by some tractor. Not good – my front wheel bumped something and hit the side, throwing me to the left. I put my foot out to stop the fall but my leg folded under me, and I skidded to an abrupt halt kinda twisted up in my bike, somehow. I'm sure you all know that feeling of relief you get when you check your leg and realise that nothing is broken or dislocated this time and you're all OK. I landed on soft mud so didn't even get a scratch, just a strain on my knee and a bruise on my ankle where the frame hit me.

I wasn't feeling 100% on Sunday, but was feeling good enough to run the prestigious Crawley 10k run. On the whole Crawley sucks but there is a good 10k race. I didn't know it was good until this morning, but I think it is one of the coolest I've run in. The run goes almost entirely though Tilgate Forest, with some pretty good hill stretches to run up. Most of the runners were doing it in regular running shoes, but I've got my off-road background and did it in some nice, grippy off-road shoes. I found that when we got to puddles or muddy patches I could race right across them, whereas the rest of the crowd where had to slow down and work there way round them. I crossed the finish line 55 minutes and 9 seconds after I started – not bad considering I was running injured.

So that was my exciting weekend.



The Adventure Race organisers gave out this groovy bit of headwear.

Isa Guha also had an exciting weekend, taking 5-14 (5 bowled out, 14 runs conceded) against the West Indies in the second of the recent ODI series on Saturday. The first of the ODI matches on Friday had looked a bit more promising for the tourists until heavy rain led to the abandonment of the match with England on 156-4 (156 runs, 4 batters out). The second match did not go well for the Windies at all, with them all out for only 41. England soon got the 42 they needed, winning the match by ten full wickets and taking the series 1-0.


England captain Charlotte Edwards in full flight against the Windies. She made 50 in the first match - her 30th international 50, which is pretty impressive.

England Women's Cricket team are really doing well at the moment, despite playing less often than the chaps do. I think that this is because unlike the men's teams, which are usually overworked and constantly under attack from an hostile press, the women's teams don't play so much and the press pretty much leave them alone.