The night after the morning before...

36 hours later and I'm still on a high. I keep on looking for more reports on Cool Running, just so I can relive it all again. Mind you, re-living it hurts less than the first time around :-0

TA's report is pretty complete, so I'll just rave on for a while and add a couple of personal things. If it's too long, feel free to skip it... :-)

Pain - I was expecting the thigh to play up at some stage. I guess that in my heart I knew that resting it for a week wouldn't fix it completely, so I was always conscious of the reality that I may have to pull out. I'm not sure that I was really emotionally ready to quit though. Steve (26miles) said to me before the race that coming up out of the domain for the second time would really test any niggles, and he sure was right. It was about that point that I had to think "no, this is not body-damaging pain, this is just stress pain. I can keep going". I had to concentrate pretty much from there on to make sure that I didn't start favouring the sore leg - getting unbalanced with 5k stil to go was a sure recipe for disaster. The sharp turn around in College St really hurt, but from there I knew that it was a nice run home.

TA talked about how we used Tim's tips to help us pick up lots of time down Hunter St, but the truth is that I couldn't have done it any other way. The only way that I could cope with the pressure on my quads was to lean forward a bit, up my cadence to billy-o and let gravity take over. Worked a treat!

Support - I know that lots has been written about the support of the CR cheer squad (and they truly were soooo good), but it goes so much further than that. In each C2S we've done, we've been two in 60,000 - you push on, stay inside your own head and get to the finish. Because of TA's accident last year, I ran it on my own, and the combination of my inability to reach my goal time and my general alone-ness was overwhelming. Contrast that with Sunday. Everywhere we went, there were calls of "Go Cool Runner". People who's running prowess I am in awe of would call out encouragement as we passed. I even remember thinking as we passed the leaders (well, as they passed us) how cool it was that they were wearing the same colours as us. It's a bit like going to the footy, except we are the players, not just the bokes on the terraces. Maybe, just maybe, we really are runners :-)

Recovery - This morning, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. We've run the distance & the pace before (though never concurrently :-), but I really knew this morning that we'd been in a race. I can't wait to get back into some gentle exercise to start to work all the kinks out.

Anyhow, it's now ridiculously late and TA will shoot me when she sees this (maybe I can roll the time back a few hours... :-)

sfG