As it turned out, the wind predictions were accurate, perhaps even conservative, but at least rain at least held off. I subscribe to the assertion that you lose more time running into a wind than you gain having it behind you. So, when it’s windy, you will lose time, even if you spend equal distances with the wind into/behind you. With a southerly wind, it looked like the latter half of the race would be tough, and so it proved!
Look closely and you can almost feel the wind!
I expected this to be a fairly flat route as it covers some of the same ground as the Wolverton 5. For the first 5 miles I concluded the wind must be behind me, as I averaged under 6:08/mile – not far off my 10 mile PB pace. Then as the course started to turn into the wind, the mile splits started to get slower – and then much slower!
I was trying to run to a target heart-rate and so tried not to worry about the splits too much. This was helped by seeing that those around me were slowing down at least as much. By the end of mile 12, my average mile-pace had dropped from sub-6:08 at the 5-mile mark to 6:16! Then, at last, some respite. As the 12 mile marker approached, we changed direction, not only losing the worst of the wind, but starting to go slightly downhill. Mercifully, the route continued gently down for all but the last 400 metres of the race. As a result, my average pace was back to a shade under 6:14/mile by the finish.
I had not looked at the actual time on my watch, but I knew my PB was set at 6:20 pace, so I was almost certainly going to set a new PB. As I entered the final straight I could see the line and the race clock, the latter showing about 01:21:20. I put on a final sprint, overtaking one more runner and, on my watch, recorded a start>finish line time of 01:21:35. In the conditions, I was very happy with this new PB!
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