Since taking part in the marathon relay last year at La Queue lez Yvelines, I'd been wanting to redo a marathon relay with a team so when I heard that some seniors from the club were taking part at Pontault Comabault I jumped at the chance to participate.
Another short night as Nico picked me up at 6:35 to get to our meeting point for 6:45. Just over an hour later and we were at the race startline, slightly cold and fairly tired. We picked up our numbers and we set off for different warming up sessions.
So what does an Ekiden involve ?
i) 6 runners - Jean-Marc, myself, Nico, Adrien, Patrick and Gérald (in this order)
ii) 6 legs - 5km, 10km, 5km, 10km, 5km then 7.2km
iii) A good team spririt and plenty of encouragement
So I was running 2nd leg and the first 10k section. I wondered from the start whether this was a good choice as Jean-Marc is by far the strongest runner and Nico has proved himself to be faster than me too in recent races. Anyway, I wasn't in charge and I was happy to have another shot at the distance after pulling out of my last 10k race two weeks ago in Fontenay le Fleury.
Jean-Marc set off and he was at the front of the pack. I prayed that he wouldn't stay there as the pressure on me was going to be tremendous. I lined up ready for the change-over and there he was heading in in first place. I picked up the baton (well a hair band actually) and set off at a reasonable pace.
I didn't want to set off too fast as that's been my problem lately so I concentrated on setting a steady pace. I passed through the 1 kilometre marker in 3:30 and a few metres later I was overtaken by a runner clearly in a class above (he went on to run 32:50 for the leg). I turned off the tarmac now and onto the forest track and a long straight that went on for what seemed like miles. A second runner overtook me, also at a good pace and I let him go too. I ran back down the straight into the final side of the square course and I felt pleased with my pace. There was still 6k to do but I was running fairly steadily.
This feeling disappeared on the second loop where my motivation waned and my speed with it. A third runner came past and I was just holding on now. The second time I hit the long straight, I could feel the slight breeze in my face and the very slight uphill (the course was as flat as possible and it was proabbaly just the 6 - 8 km blues setting in). I concentrated on not letting the team down and not giving up again even if I relaxed the pace slightly. This was fatal as I ran the 9th km in 4:00 dead, well below the 3:46 I'd been averaging on the first lap.
Splits went as follows: 3:30, 3:38, 3:48, 3:46, 3:52, 3:54, 3:48, 3:57, 4:00, 3:57
Handed over to Nico at 10k and glad to have finished in 38:17. Disappointed with the time but I lack race practise over 10k and my training has eased considerably since Paris marathon. Need to get back into it again now. I handed over in 4th place and that was the way it was to end for us. 4th position from 65 teams participating was a good result and I was proud to be part of the team.
We finished in an overall time of 2:36:50 so a good steady average speed. Would look forward to running this type of race again especially with the team there today.
Ambazac next weekend and a 32 km trail. Need to work on the motivation if I'm to finish this one ...
Further race report (in French this time) on Nico's blog. He ran a cracker in 18:04 and would have gone under the 18 minutes if he hadn't got confused with his watch and thought that he'd run the first km in 3:14 ...! So much for technology.
