Recipe for Success

We were up early yesterday and made our way to London along empty Sunday morning roads. I had decided to slip in an extra 10K race to assess my progress and decide how best to use the rest of the summer to prepare for my autumn PB attempts. Our destination was Regents Park, which hosts a series of five 10K races on the first Sunday of each month from May to September. These are relatively small events, with up to 500 runners taking part, and usually such events are the preserve of the very serious (i.e fast) runner but I was encouraged by the description on the event's website of "A mixed ability race series. All runners welcome". Hopefully I would not be awarded a wooden spoon at the finish.

Regents Park Mosque

The start time was 9:30 am, and we arrived in very good time and parked on Regent's Park Outer Circle very close to the entrance to London Zoo. It was a glorious summer morning with not a single cloud in the sky. One of the Royal Parks, Regents Park is a vast open space right in the very centre of London and it looked magnificent in the sunshine. The start and finish line was next to the Hub, a great facility located a few hundred metres from Monkey Gate, appropriately named in view of its proximity to the Zoo. The Hub's attractive circular cafe sits on top of a grass mound, which on closer inspection houses entrances to facilities including changing rooms and showers. It's the base for a range of sports that take place within the park as well as exercise classes and children's activities.

The visible part of the Hub

The race itself consists of three laps around a route in the northern half of the park, skirting the boating lake and the Zoo on the way round. It's an interesting and attractive run, especially on such a glorious morning.

Mother and baby gorilla - photo taken on a visit to the Zoo with Hannah earlier in the year.

The route was well marshalled by smiling members of the Mornington Chaser's Running Club, and every km was marked by a luminous yellow sign. The start and finish area was presided over by an extremely cheerful fellow with a loud hailer which he used to good effect both for organisational purposes and to broadcast his often amusing encouragement to runners as they passed through or approached the finish line at the end of their final lap. The whole event exuded a friendly, happy atmosphere, making me very keen to take part again - maybe on a regular basis.

I completed the first lap in a fraction over 20 minutes, an encouraging start. From then on, though, I began to wilt in the heat to the extent that when I passed the fringes of the zoo for the third and final time my pace was probably on a par with some of the more ponderous inhabitants of its famous reptile house.

Terrapins are reptiles and not amphibians in case you're wondering

Along with many other participants, I was lapped on my second circuit by the runners on track to finish in 40 minutes or less. Now that's an impressive feat and I salute their speed and stamina. Some of them, however, I could teach a thing or two about personal hygiene. Moving at considerable speed, they were only within my nasal radar for a fleeting second or two, but at least three or four of them left behind an overpowering scent of the worst kind of body odour as they sped into the distance. There's no excuse for it in my view. Sure, running is a sweaty business, especially in high temperatures, but it must require a monumental avoidance of baths, showers, washing machines and deodorant to build up a smell like that. Very off putting to say the least.

Anyway, rant over, back to the race itself. In spite of summoning the energy for an impressive sprint finish, my watch showed a disappointing finishing time of 1:10:01. My official result on the website was a slightly more respectable 1:09:58, which was marginally slower than my time for the London 10k just over a month ago. Although I finished towards the back of the field, a steady stream of runners continued to pass the finish line for quite some time afterwards, possibly putting my performance on such a hot day into perspective.

Feeling the heat with the finishing line in sight

So where does this leave me? Even allowing for the effects of the heat yesterday there's no escaping that after making very good progress towards my goals for the first three months of the year, I have since reached a plateau of Hog's Back proportions. After the Newham 10k at the end of March I calculated that if I could improve by just another 10% I would give myself a good chance of beating at least some of my PBs during the Autumn. However, in spite of sticking to my training intentions fairly closely if anything I've got slower.

I think perhaps I need to take another look at my diet. About 9 months ago I changed my diet to avoid anything containing wheat as far as possible, and this has had a very positive effect on the health of my digestive system and my fitness generally. It's given me a lot more energy and, unlike before, I very rarely get a headache nowadays. You may have heard that since switching to a gluten free diet at the start of the year, new Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic has only been defeated once in fifty one matches and today took over from Rafael Nadal as world number one. So avoiding wheat seems to be a good idea, but to match the scale of Novak's improvement I think I probably need to make a few other changes too. Yes, chocolate and alcohol I'm looking at you!

Don't worry, I have no intention of giving either of these up completely. Both are high on my list of life's little pleasures and after my earlier misgivings about reaching 50, I have come to view 2011 as a celebratory year and the sense of celebration would not be complete without the occasional glass of wine or bar of Cadbury's Whole Nut. Nevertheless I do seem to have been consuming increasing quantities of both recently and a more controlled approach may well lead to improved results in the Autumn I feel.

So there you have it, my recipe for success: continue to stay away from wheat, keep on building up the training gradually, and restore wine and chocolate to their previous status of occasional treats. It sounds straightforward enough, but sticking to it may prove easier said than done!

Alternatively, I could stop having baths and washing my clothes .....