I should have known when my number didn't arrive in the post as promised that I should just give up on the Aware 10k in the Phoenix Park. Stubbornly I e-mailed the organisers on Friday and was assured I could turn up at the start line and collect a new number. So far so good! Right?
Saturday morning came too quickly and I reluctantly dragged myself out of my warm bed. I'm not one for lie in's but even a toe out of the covers confirmed it was a cold one. I pulled the curtains to see the surrounding countryside liberally dusted in white. Not snow but a hard frost. "At least it's dry and bright and still." I thought, trying to look on the bright side. Perfect morning for a race once I'm warmed up.
An hour later I was wrapped up and ready to go. Or would be once I got the windscreen defrosted. An impatient phone call from a friend J I was giving a lift to got me moving while trying to see out of one portion of my frozen windscreen. "Oh well! It's always a few degrees warmer in Dublin." I thought. Hmmm.
We arrived in Dublin relatively quickly and it wasn't until I went to park the car and it skidded a couple of feet that I realised how frosty it was on Chesterfield Avenue, the main thoroughfare of the park and the road a lot of the race was going to be on. I looked at J and got very worried for the first time that this race wasn't going to go ahead. My confidence wasn't helped by trying to get out of the car on the slippery roads.
Long story short, the race did go ahead but not with me in it. After a number of delays of the start to allow the course to defrost and warnings that the conditions were "very, very, very, very dangerous" (there may even have been another very) I knew this wasn't going to be a PB day for me. Considering that I'm mortally terrified of falling on ice I decided early on I wasn't going to run and encouraged anyone who would listen to do the same. We had already made the donation to charity. Why risk life and limb?
As we were there and dressed a run of some sort was in order so I let the much faster J drag me around on the grass of the Phonix Park for a bit of a cross country jaunt. It was heavy going and my hardish effort is a bit of a jog for him so it was a relief for both of us to get back on the now much safer paths later on for a faster final couple of miles. At least the morning wasn't a total write-off from a training point of view!
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