Pen-y Fan Your Thoughts...

The weather just about did us right in the end but it was touch and go there for a while. With a reasonable field assembled (78 runners) and with the sun just showing an edge through the clouds and mist with set out on the 6 kilometres of the Pen-y-Fan fell race. With 1,800 feet of ascent it's a short sharp blast up to South Wales' Highest peak and back down again.

I was looking to improve on last years time, which, as mis-reported in an earlier blog post, was not 31:57 - that was my summit split - but in fact 43:28. Could I do it? More importantly, did I? Oh yeah baby - but not by as much as I thought I could have.

My race was steady if nothing else. I went well on the climb, running much of it except for the steeps bits. and the descent was OK but if I had to say which was better, for once it would be the ascent. I feel the old climbing legs are slowly returning. That's not to say the descent wasn't good. I picked up a couple of places so I have to be happy with that.

I finished in 42:20 - a whole 1 minute and 8 seconds quicker than last year - but for all the extra effort it didn't feel like it was enough. I reckon I was inside the top twenty, perhaps even the top fifteen but we'll have to wait and see. All in all, quicker is quicker so I mustn't grumble. It will be interesting to see how my summit split compares to last years (if they managed to capture them). The race is well organised by Crispin of Mynydd Du and there's no reason to suspect he won't get all the data up together as per usual.

Now, as I blog, my quads feel fairly destroyed. I'm not thinking tomorrow's Fan-y-Big race is going to go quite so well as today's but you never know. Going to try an easy half hour on the bike to get the blood flowing and hopefully aid the recovery of my poor old quads. Then, of course, I have to hope the groin strain doesn't raise it's evil head. Everything feels OK at the moment so fingers crossed...