Sandy 10

Gavin Meadows with green top and blue shorts

Grantham Running Club’s Gav Meadows made the long but relatively straight forward drive south on the A1 to compete in the Sandy 10 mile road race on Sunday 7th April. The race was hand picked by Gav for it’s timing, distance & reasonably fast course - the objective being to capitalise on recent marathon training & attempt a personal best. He said ‘The course looked like it had PB potential although there is one significant hill at mile two. I was hoping that the rest of the route being flat or downhill would make up for this!’

Gav started strongly and confidently completing the first mile in 6:24 although in hindsight this was slightly faster than ideal for this distance. mile two, as expected, proved to be the toughest and most costly of the race - battling up the steady climb as the runners headed out of Sandy towards Everton. Gav found his race pace again quickly at the top of the hill and stayed very close to his 6:35 per mile target for the next 3 miles.

It was during the ‘triangular loop’ beyond Everton and the long straight back towards Sandy that his pace dropped slightly. Miles six to nine averaged around 6:50 per mile. On reflection this was probably a consequence of the first mile being slightly too fast. However, assisted by the downhill, Gav managed to run the last mile at an almost identical pace to the first for a strong finish.

Gav crossed the finish line in 38th position overall out of 477 runners clocking 1:07:30 which was good enough for 16th of 67 runners in the Senior Men category. Frustratingly this was just 21 seconds slower than his personal best of 1:07:09 set at the Derby 10 in 2016. Gav said ‘The result is very frustrating but overall I have to be pleased with today’s performance. Being close to a PB is better than being nowhere near it! The hill proved to be the difference along with perhaps starting the race slightly faster than I planned. I have high hopes of running a 10 mile PB in the near future as I know there are flatter races available.’