Up Hell Time Trial

Call me a sadist but this has got to be my favourite race of the week, god knows why as it’s simply you against the clock, you just forget about what anyone else is doing, head down and eye balls out basically for 2.25km – UPHILL

Kevin took the car tonight as Karen was coming, well we did need a photographer!! Having checked in with Doug at Falkland again and checked to see if anyone was needing a lift up to the East Lomond car park we set of. Driving up the road to the car park I remember Kevin saying that sometimes it’s better not to know what’s in front of you. Ah well he shouldn’t have watched my Tour DVD from last year then…..

Having parked up at the top, we had time for a quick warm-up, which more consisted of Kevin ‘Tiger Balming’ himself up, reckon he was having a competition with Mel to see who could go through the most in a week; personally I’ll stick with Deep Freeze!!
The way this race works is that everybody is paired up with another random runner and set of at 30 seconds intervals from the bottom of the hill, where John Murdoch & Ron Mill have this part down to a ‘T’

Kevin had an early start slot of about 7:38 and I was of half an hour later, so just wandered down the hill later watching some of them coming up, knowing I was going to be looking that bad 30 minutes later. I was paired up with Jan Van Den Berg from Corstorphine, so after a quick good luck we were off. The legs felt heavy from the beach the night before but I just tried to ignore that, went through 400m in 4:02 and 800 in 8:05, slightly slower than last year but it a bit windier I reckon. Never looked at the watch from then on but as you near the summit everybody who’s finished is lining the road cheering everyone on which is a good boost.

Kevin had finished in 14:38 and I crossed the line in 11:38, the 8th fastest time of the night, and when you consider only 5 runners broke the magical 11 minutes I was quite pleased. After some more photo shots, a few of us piled back to Mel’s house for some Chilli, rice & nacho’s, still reckon she was trying to fill us up for Saturdays final race of the ‘Tour’, ended up rolling in the door at about 11pm, got to my bed about half 1, oh dear, racing again in 12 hours!!

As it stands I’m now sitting in 12th place overall with Iain Taylor 2 seconds ahead and Stevie King 33 seconds behind, talk about a Carnegie sandwich. Pete had 32 seconds on me which I thought would only be possible if he had a really bad day at the office.