Olympic Challenge: City 17 done: Melbourne

Last Sunday was the turn of Melbourne in my Olympic challenge.

The race I had entered was a half marathon and was being organised by a local running club called the Victorian Road Runners. I had found the race on their site which worked out perfectly that I could find two races so close together given that it would have been a bit of an effort to come Down Under for one race and then make the trip again another time for the second one. I was a little dubious that the race would go ahead as on the club’s website it said that runners just needed to turn up on the day and pay $20 to run. It was a far cry from the massive event from City2Surf but I was looking forward to it.

The race was in Princes Park in the north of the city. Arriving at the park there were probably about 100 people and we all paid our entrance fee for the race and were given a hand written number to place on our shirts. The main race organiser then gathered us round to brief us on the course. I immediately thought that since I was not familiar with the area at all I would simply follow the person in front until said organiser began his speech by saying that people seemed to immediately turn dumb as soon as they put on a pair of trainers and would follow the person in front meaning that if the leader went wrong then so did the entire group. Ok. So that made me one of the dumb ones then.

The course was 5 laps of the park which I was dreading (as running in circles is not as much fun) but just had to man up and get on with my laps!

Setting off the leaders were going at a very similar pace to mine which was good and made the first lap enjoyable. There were three of us running together up to this point when the third person started to drop behind. This left two of us running side by side for the first of the larger laps. The laps thereafter were going fairly quickly and at the end of each one I would tick off in my head the percentage of the race that I had completed. This made it much easier to get through another lap of the same thing. The course itself (I avoided saying route there as it means something completely different and a little rude in Australia) was fairly flat. The park was pretty quiet and picturesque and the outskirts of the cemetery that I saw looked impressive. Along one side of the park we ran next to the cemetery which had a high fence. The sun was rising which felt lovely on the skin but when running down this hill it created a strobe light effect which left me feeling a little dizzy after the first time let alone the following 3 times. The hill became known in my head as “strobe light hill” thereafter. To rival Sydney’s hill offering from the week before there was also a slight incline on the other side of the cemetery to strobe light hill which became known to me as “horrendous hill.” It wasn’t a steep incline or even particularly lengthy but it did hurt and the fact it came around every 18 minutes throughout the race played havoc with my mood.

Soon enough though the last lap was upon me. The leader was still about 100m or so ahead of me but I knew that unless something drastic were to happen I would finish in second place. The last kilometer took an age to be over but the finish line eventually was behind me.

I finished in a time of 1 hour 21 minutes 41 seconds. Not a personal best but still a pretty solid time and I was happy to be taking home a medal of the silver variety. The event was only giving out medals for the first three winners so getting a souvenir was a total bonus.

So that's the last of my Olympic runs for 2014 but there are plenty more to come later on this year in the UK.....

Mark finishing....