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| Yay! 151st place! |
Today was one freaking weird day, and I mean that in the best way possible.
I'd left a window and curtains open last night because it was kind of stuffy, so I ended up grumpily rising with the sun at a bit after four. I went and met Sir Charlie at Pembroke a little before eight, and he commandeered a spanner from the porters in an attempt to lower the seat on his spare bike.
Let me say now that Sir Charlie isn't much shorter than Sir Andy, who I recently discovered is over a foot taller than yours truly.
Needless to say, Sir Charlie's efforts were in vain. Appreciated, but in vain. The top tube came up to about my waist, and we stood there for a moment, wondering how we were going to make this work.
"It's alright," I said to Sir Charlie, who looked from his bike to me and back again with increasing bewilderment, "I'll figure it out."
I rue the day.
It took me approximately two false starts to mount up and wobble away, down the left side of the cobblestone street with only the vaguest recollection of bike-riding to guide me. Every junction was an exercise in a flying dismount and painful re-mount, and every downward stroke a calf workout, the tips of my toes clinging to the pedal.
Somehow, we made it to Milton in one sweaty (on my part) piece, and we did a bit of warming up together, taking the first loop of the course at an easy jog as Sir Charlie indicated bridges and "twisty" turns that would be "slippy" because of the recent rain. We did our own pre-race drills, striding and leaping about like idiots across fields where there grew actual green grass. The weather was wonderful--about the mid-sixties--as we lined up at the start. I bid farewell to Sir Charlie, who elbowed his pointy way to the front, and then we were off.
It was a pretty crowded start, what with no seeding and no waves, just one huge mass of brightly-clothed humanity blasting off from an invisible line. I said to myself that I'd be glad with a sub-8:30 average, given my complete and utter lack of speed training since my last half, but I found myself clocking around 7:30 for the first mile, and all my pre-race "Please don't take this race seriously" and "Please treat this as a tempo workout" demands flew straight out the window.
Sir Charlie hadn't been lying when he'd said the course was "twisty." The longest straightaway we had probably wasn't much longer than two hundred or three hundred meters, and there were some odd right-corners over bridges and the like that again made me very glad I had my trail shoes on.
But the trees were green and the grass was green, and there was water in the creek.
I was thoroughly hating myself for agreeing to actually race a race by about the two-mile mark, but with my marathoner mentality, blasted myself for being such a wimp. How much longer could one mile be?
The freakishly rocky stretch to the finish threw all plans for a quick sprint clear out the window, and I settled for creaking by without falling flat on my face.
Sir Charlie was waiting for me at the finish, and it turns out he'd beaten me by something like three minutes, even though he's something like three times as old as I am. I'm still trying very hard not to be embarrassed about this.
Anyhow.
He introduced me to a few of his friends from his running club, and I've apparently now been invited out to practice with them.
What the heck.
But no, the story doesn't end here.
You see, we had to bike back to Pembroke.
I honestly believe I would have been at least a minute faster if I hadn't biked to Milton in the first place.
With no small amount of resignation, I climbed onto a bench and leapt onto Sir Charlie's bike, following him out the back of the park to the Cam. What followed was, hands down, the most painful forty-minute bike ride of my life. Not only were my legs too short for the pedals, but my general lack of length in the torso also meant I was bent nearly double to reach the handlebars. As a result, I found myself perched on the very pointy pointy end of the bike seat.
You can probably see where I'm going with this.
By the time we arrived back at Pembroke, my lady parts had passed beyond "why are we biking on a gravel path" to "flaming, flaming, ow. ow." to "life has no meaning," winding up somewhere between "euthanized" and "ground beef." Sir Charlie was a combination of bemused and exasperated, I think, when I conducted the last of many flying dismounts before him and declared I would not be able to walk straight for a week.
"See you Tuesday night?" he said.
"Mmrbflgh," I replied, stalking off back to King's and a hot shower.
Somehow, I managed to forget to take any pictures at all this morning, which, I think, I might come to regret.
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