Well, this was my longest run in quite a while (since the Dorking 10 mile race a month ago, which I wasn’t supposed to run) but after running at the Bushy Park Time Trial yesterday I was looking forward to this race. I have never run an 8 mile race before but given that the bit of a 10 mile race I hate is between 8 and 9 miles, I was thinking this could be a good one.

My splits were (1) 10:09 (2) 10:13 (3) 10:12 (4) 10:46 (5) 10:51 (6) 10:26 (7) 10:46 (8) 10:24. My overall miling pace was 10:28 per mile, which compared to my 10 mile PB, is 47 seconds per mile faster. I don’t know what happened to make me go off at such a pace but I was happy to note as I was running that my pace never hit 11 minutes per mile. For me this is great and demonstrates a real improvement since the Thames Towpath Ten in April.

It was a bit rainy and a bit windy (especially along the towpath, for my mile 4 and 5 splits) but overall not bad conditions, also a bit muddy running through some random wood which appeared at about 7.5 miles!!

The finishing straight was fun as I was determined to catch and overtake the man in front of me who was running in football socks (I *hate* that!) and plus I could see I was close to the 1:24:00 mark and wanted to make sure I got under 84 minutes. My finish time was 1:23:47 (I was aiming for 1:30 based on my previous “longer race” performances) and I am very pleased with how it went. I look forward to next year…