Locke Park 20Ten

Catherine round the final bend

The build up to this year's Virgin London Marathon continued for two of GRC long distance runners with Catherine Payne and Robert McArdle making the long trip north to Redcar to compete in last Sunday's  Locke Park 20Ten  where both opted for the full twenty miles. This is a tough race in which the runners have to negotiate 20 one mile laps of the park, to make it tougher the new route has two 180 degree turns which makes the athletes come to a dead stop and have to accelerate up to speed again during every mile, this means it is impossible to get into any sort of rhythm and effectively the race is a 2½ hour effort session!

There is only one real straight on the lap and it enjoyed a 45mph+ headwind coming straight off the North Sea to further test the field. In a crowded March race calendar this event  came just seven days after both completed a full marathon so they were expecting cumulative fatigue to play a big part later in the race. Catherine started well concentrating on running as far as she could at marathon pace before succumbing to heavy legs and the inevitable slowdown. Her plan was to keep the faster pace for the first ten miles but as she was still running well she was able to go through half marathons distance around the 1:36 mark and keep some sort of form right through to sixteen miles when she decided to ease off. Her finishing time of 2:33:59 was well outside her club record but was good enough to place her third lady and, using the WMA age grading that decides prize-winners for this race, her score of just over 80% made her fourth overall.

Robert McArdle found it particularly tough, ditching his hat after it kept blowing off in the first lap he got as far as eight miles before he had to dig as deep as you do in the final stages of a marathon, going through ten miles in around 77 minutes he was finding it was taking longer and longer to overtake the runners he was lapping at the same time as the leader were whizzing past him a full two minutes a lap faster. By lap 16 he was running on legs made of lead and was scuffing his shoes so often on the tarmac where the tree roots pushed it up that he seriously imagined he would wear a hole in them! The main motivation that pushed him on was trying to avoid being lapped by his teammate. His finishing time of 2:41:34 was his slowest ever at this distance but still good enough to be placed 17th when the age grading was applied and his 70% score ranked against the younger runners.