Respect The Social racing

A bit of road racing last weekend provided an opportunity for a pleasant bit of socialising. The event was the Worksop Half Marathon (30^th edition, Halloween special). This was to be Mrs RTS’ first attempt at 13.1 miles, and was a prospect to which she was most not certainly looking forward.

Daft B and Mrs Daft B arrived at the RTS residence at mid afternoon on Saturday, just in time to see Mrs RTS doubled up on the sofa with stomach ache (surgical removal of gall bladder pending). I and the two Daft B’s saw through this lame attempt to feign injury and get out of the race, and did what was right – we left her where she was and went for a lovely coffee and cake at a nearby café / bistro.

Whilst enjoying our victuals I exchanged phone calls with Lord Bond, the team RTS support crew genius. His crew car had broken down, so we drove to pick him up and took him back to our place for the pre-race pasta carbo-loading fest. Not that Bondy would be in the race – having his nose running is surpassing his maximum preferred level of athletic endeavour.

Bondy still had useful input, though, having recently acquired a large remote controlled helicopter. This has obvious potential support crew uses for the next big RTS project, but a lot more practice is needed in flying the thing to make it actually useful and not a simply a highly messy cause of death for anyone within a mile radius.

So there were five of us for the pre-race evening meal. I cooked what our children refer to as “Daddy’s Best Pasta”, ably assisted by Daft B, whilst Mrs RTS lay in bed and Bondy chatted to Mrs Daft B, who was recovering from running Huddersfield Park Run that morning. In that race she had gone over and above the required level of sprint-finish effort and thrown up just after crossing the finish line. Not for the first time. I believe she has thrown up after finishing every event she has done; a marvellously stupid level of commitment.

With five minutes to go before the pasta was ready, I remembered that Mrs RTS was supposed to be making pudding. With her still on her death bed this clearly wasn’t going to happen, so Daft B and I rampaged through our own version of Hells Kitchen, complete with swearing, mess and insults, and knocked up an apple crumble in four and a half minutes.

The food was lovely, and I believe it may have been washed down by a few glasses of vino unconscio. With carb stores full, it was time for bed.

By Sunday morning Mrs RTS had recovered and was ‘up for the race’. Daft B wandered downstairs in his running kit, as did I, and bowls of porridge were wolfed down. Before we knew it we were collecting our numbers and fastening timing chips to shoe laces – all except for Mrs Daft B who was the day’s official observer, having run and blown chunks the previous morning.

Mrs RTS’ plan was to survive and finish her first half marathon. Daft B was experimenting with the feasibility of his ‘couch-to-half-marathon-in-a-month’ training plan, hoping to get around in two hours. I was hoping for a fast time, having tapered for the race. Well, sort of tapered. Not wanting to drop from my ultra-training schedule I ran the week’s scheduled 45 miles in four days, then sat on my backside eating for three days to ‘freshen my legs’.

The weather was pretty good. A small amount of drizzle dampened the road and kept temperatures cool. Thankfully there was little wind. Worksop is a reasonably sized event and I had a bit of trouble squeezing myself into the packed ‘sub 1:30’ pen at the front end of the line of 2,500 runners.

The horn sounded to start the race, and immediately there were myriad quiet squeaks as everyone’s shoes slipped ever so slightly on the damp road. I chose not to wear a watch and was running the entire race on ‘feel’. I find I know how to pace my effort from how I am feeling, and can sometimes get preoccupied and distracted with GPS info like ‘current pace’ and split times.

This proved a double edged sword. I did indeed run well, posting my second fastest half marathon time of 1 hour 23 minutes. But I was 40 seconds outside a personal best. Would I have nailed those 40 seconds if I had my GPS, or would I have tried too hard and crashed and burned. Who knows?

Anyway, I had forgone the big sprint finish because as soon as I had finished I was to be ‘mule train’ support crew. Within a minute of crossing the line I had collected my backpack from Mrs Daft B, gathered my race T-shirt and bag of race freebies and set off backwards round the course looking for my ‘team’. The backpack was full of drinks, gels and jelly sweets for them.

Although my recently spanked legs were initially reluctant to start jogging, jog they had to as I wanted to get far enough back along the course to be of use when I met Daft B and Mrs RTS. This was very enjoyable as I got to watch the race. OK, I missed the first hundred or so runners (as I was 68^th), but got to see and cheer on everyone else.

I had made my way back to the 11.5 mile point when I saw Daft B coming the other way. His training plan had got him to ten miles and he was doing the rest on blind stubbornness. He was developing a vacant thousand yard stare and seemed desperately in need of the bag of Haribo sweets I gave him. He recounted to me afterwards that it took him several minutes to work out how to open the bag to get to eat them.

A further mile back was Mrs RTS and her friend, Sarah. I stayed with them, carrying my mobile sweet shop alongside all the way to the finish. Sarah was struggling. This was her first half marathon as well and she had been too nervous to eat properly that morning. I made sure she had some Jelly Babies, and then encouraged her to down a Multipower Gel and plenty of squash.

Five minutes later she was fired up again, and both ladies ran well to the finish. After the extra four post-race miles, my legs weren’t too happy about trying to run hard for the last half mile to get a spot to see them cross the line.

So, it was success all round. As the post-race euphoria died down, hunger struck, and Mrs RTS demanded feeding. There was no time for a repeat of the previous evening’s chef activities, so it was straight off to a local carvery, where she almost fell asleep in her dinner.

It was a great weekend of social running, and some multi-tasking from me – chef, runner, and support crew! The only bad bit was having to tidy up the kitchen after that high-speed crumble.

Oh, and watch out for future helicopter related team RTS schenanigans!!