Bray Head

This is a picture from my latest mountain race yesterday evening. It was seriously hard. it was around 5 to 6k (depending on who you ask) around 2 mountains in bray. It's the shortest race of the season, but faster paced because of that. I did the early start and came 3rd out of that group, beaten only by 2 dudes! And one was German! I never mind being beaten by Germans! And the other dude was perfectly fit and healthy. I held him till the summit but he passed my on the way back down when i got a shoulder cramp. You know the one that's like someone is driving a pick-axe into your inner shoulder? Had to slow down for a bit cause of that.

The route was out and back along the same path, so on the way back down i started running into the people from the normal start. My friend Ronan was at the lead. I ran into him early enough, and then had a steady stream of people to pass for around 2/3rds of the way down. I was just on an incline up to the first summit again when i really thought I was going to have to stop cause I was going to have a heart attack when the photographer dude appeared as if from nowhere. So obviously you can't stop if you're being photographed, so I kept going, then soon came across another downhill. Now this downhill was the first uphill I had encountered after the start and a lot of it actually had to be climbed hand and foot, so it was pretty difficult to get down it at any speed. Then there was a gentle concrete descent out onto the main Bray promenade where there were loads of normal non-purple-faced folk to run embarrassingly past to the finish, around 500m away. now there was a choice of running on a path or grass, so i picked the grass. Slower, but easier on the legs. So I sprinted as fast as i could, using up the very last of my energy to cross the line. In the wrong direction. A friend of mine was a race marshall and she was like "get outside the wall and run in the long way". I was so confused. So I had to jump over a wall and run around another 50m and turn, where Ronan passed me, and then back through the finish again. If I'd kept to the path I would have seen the markers leading around the long way and would have beaten ronan (15 minutes behind). But a great race. They asked me not to do the early start again cause i'm too fast!!!! Yeah!!!!! I'm holding 155th out of 385 in the league. And I came in at 45:58, 160% of the winning time which was my aim for the season! Hopefully i can equal it next week on a longer route. This is a picture of Ronan leaping a fence on the descent.