On Sunday 22 May 2011, I ran the Stoke Row 10k for the first time. It's a relatively close race to home, but the thing that sold it for me was free music festival in the pub gardens afterwards. I thought this would be a great opportunity for my wife to have something to do whilst I run around the 'burbs and it would also make the run a bit of a "grand day out", which it proved to be, but we'll get onto the day's entertainment in a moment. First the race.

First, the race description...

The 10k route will start and finish at The Cherry Tree Inn, Stoke Row, taking you through some beautiful undulating Oxfordshire Countryside. Starting at 10.30 am, you will be chip timed, have water stops, plenty of clear route signage and marshalls.

This is pertinent as "undulating" is probably a little tame, but "hilly" is a bit too severe. This is quite a tough run as the elevation graph from my Garmin shows...

As you can see, there's quite a bit of climbing involved. It is also mostly offroad which the race description doesn't mention. It would have been good to know this in advance as I would have liked to have tackled it in my Merrells.

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Well, we find ourselves in the middle of 2011, not quite slap bang in the middle, but near enough for me to provide a mid-year update.

Training

So far my training programme has suited me well, though I will be making a slight change. Since the beginning of December last year, I've been working on the following schedule:

• Monday: run - usually a hard session
• Tuesday: swim - usually about 2.5km
• Wednesday: run - varies between easy and hard, depending how I feel
• Thursday: full body weights session
• Friday: run - usually a longish tempo run
• Saturday and Sunday: either race or rest

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A couple of weeks ago I commented on Twitter (which published to Facebook) that I'd be gunning for a new 10k "personal best since returning" (PBSR) to running in the Shinfield 10k. My cousin "Liked" this and then followed up the next day asking how it went as this excerpt from Facebook shows:

My cousin has a fair point there, I shouldn't really be resetting my PBs, however my response did get me thinking... maybe I should dig out those old floppies and see if I can extract the data from the old application, Gotorun, to see what I could find.

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On Sunday 15 May 2011 I ran what I think I should start to call my local 10k race - the Woodley 10k. As with the Shinfield 10k race, this is also a fast and relatively flat race and I thought I may just be able to get the sub-40min 10k I just missed at Shinfield.

Following a request from a colleague, this and hopefully my future "first time" race reports, will be a bit more in depth.

Given Woodley is so close to home, and the fact that parking is limited to pretty much whatever Woodley town centre has, my wife and I cycled to the race. Bike racks are very limited too, but nothing a long chain and a firm fence post or tree couldn't solve.

The Woodley 10k starts and finishes at the town end of Memorial Recreation Ground on Headley Road in Woodley. When we got there the kiddies' 3k race was still underway and in it's final stages and quite a large crowd of runners and supporters building up around the start/finish area. For those concerned about these sort of things, there were plenty loos on offer: about 8 port-a-loos as well as those in the buildings at the recreation ground, and a fitness instructor gave a little aerobics type warm up routine just before the race started.

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I've just received this newletter from Terra Plana in which they announced these rather strange looking "fully moulded performance sandals"...

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For a long time I've thought putting kids in shoes too much and too soon is wrong. I spent a lot of my childhood completely barefoot as it's the norm in South Africa. Looks like forcing your kids to wear shoes may have a long term impact on their health and development.

Monday was a public holiday and it turned out to be a great day for running. The weather was warm, the skies clear and I was in the mood for some running.

I ran the Reading Runner's Shinfield 10k

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In an attempt to deliberately drain the battery in my Garmin Forerunner 405CX to get it to correctly reflect it's battery usage (I'm sure this is a firmware bug, but Garmin don't seem to be doing anything about it), last night I set the backlight timeout to "never", enabled the backlight, enabled the GPS, started the timer and place the watch on my desk.

Today I imported the data (cos I'm curious) and check out where my watch went when I wasn't watching...

It managed to rack up 1.7km which is pretty impressive considering the window was closed too

My running is coming along nicely now and I'm regularly putting in the miles. Last year I only did 3 official races, other than the 3 free 5k Parkruns. This year I plan on doing quite a few more, so I've decided to join a running club.

At the moment, I don't need the services of a full running club. I have my own training programmes and goals and don't have the desire to join a proper running club and join in the club runs etc just yet. Most of this stems from the fact most clubs I've seen in the UK have a tendency to concentrate on the two extremes of running: marathon or track. They do a little in between like cross-country and shorter distance road running, but don't seem to put the same emphasis on these as they do for marathons or track. As I'm doing neither extreme at the moment so I decided to join an online-only running club, or what I like to call an "e-club". I've joined the...

For the princely sum of £16 (£15 membership + £1 PayPal admin fee) plus another £20.99 for the vest, I am now a fully fledged (well almost, I'm waiting for UKA

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In January I drew up a few goals for the year regarding the 5K distance, namely sub 19-min around about 2 April and then a sub 18-min 5K by the end of the year. Well, I think I was a little over-ambitious with these goals. The 2 April deadline came and went without a run. Problems on the home front meant there was no way I was going to be running that weekend, so I delayed my attempt. In training I soon realised I wasn't like to get sub 19-min this early in the season either, so I settled for around about 19:30 for the start of the season and we'll see how I get on from there.

Well, last Saturday I kicked off my 2011 season in fine form. It was a gloriously sunny day and I headed down the road for the Reading Parkrun

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