100 Mile Club

On Sunday morning I successfully completed my fifth King Island Imperial 20 race and hence I joined the exclusive 100 mile club (I get my own race number '30'). Just for all of you born after the conversion to metric, 20 'imperial' miles is 32 kilometers. Yes that's right I raced 32km across King Island a point to point race, from the West coast to the East Coast of King Island.

My day started early, catching a bus at 7am to take us from the finish line (in Currie) to the start line (in Naracoopa). I was starting to feel a little bit nervous but also excited I just wanted to get out and run! My starting time was 8:36am, I had carefully calculated out what running pace I needed to sustain to finish in less than 3 hours. My race strategy was to run every kilometer at 5min30sec per kilometer. Unfortunately when I am running long distances my ability to do even simple mathematic calculations (like adding 5min30sec to 5min30sec) becomes non existent and in the end I just decided to run has well as I could without stopping. I felt really good between 10 and 20km - it might have had something to do with the fact that I could see people running ahead of me, which motivated me to keep running well to catch them! I started getting tired at about 2 hours of running but then convinced myself that I had less than an hour to run and I was very capable of doing that! The last section of the run is actually quite hard work - a short but steep hill into town and then a 1km loop around town to finally cross the finish line in 2h 53min 33sec! Once again I managed to finish with my finishing pose - both arms in the air and jumping (I promise to the post the photo when I get it). A really successful run, better than I had planned with an average pace of 5min25sec per kilometer.

So what did I learn from this race? 1) I always want to do better and although improving my previous time by 3 minutes was good, 10 minutes would have been better :) 2) Even when I am hurting I can keep on running 3) Having someone ahead of me that I can try and catch motivates me more than trying to stay in front of someone 4) The reason I keep coming back to this race is because of the fantastic organisation of the whole weekend, my Gunn runner buddies and to try and be that bit quicker - oh yeah and the 1kg bag of King Island Cheese is also very nice!

Race: Time 2h53min, Distance 32km, Location West coast to east Coast, King Island, Temp 22C.

Gmap of run course: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2619540