East Cork 3K series:Race 1

After a hiatus of nearly a month from blogging, I can thankfully say I've been a bit more consistant with my training. It is now less than 2 weeks to go to the county cross country championships which is my main race of the winter. My training has gone pretty much to plan (so far) with my endurance phase leading up to the Cork half Marathon. Since then I have been trying to build stamina (using 800's,1000's & long 7 mile tempo runs).Over the last week or two I have started doing 400's & shorter faster 5 mile Tempo runs & also cut my mileage back from 70 to 55ish to enable the quality work to be done. The one thing I have lacked really is hill work but hopefully this won't count against me too much. I managed to squeeze in a XC race 10 days ago & it went well, without being spectacular.
So onto last night & the first race (of 7) in the East Cork 3K series. I love these races, they were my real introduction to racing and as it's over the same course your time really lets you know where you are. My best time from last year was 9.52 but I was confident of bettering it. I had it in my head to try and do 3.10 per lap which would give me 9.30. I felt like I was flying when I was doing my strides beforehand - better than I've ever felt before so went to the line brimming with confidence. On the first lap I found myself a few seconds down on the leading 2 after the first 600m. Then amazingly without any extra effort they started coming back to me & I actually caught them coming down the hill which ends the lap and first Kilometre. Our time was called as 3.06. As we rounded the corner I left the two lads to their own race & just concentrated on holding my pace. Even though I still felt ok I had slowed down a bit over the second half of the 2nd K & my time was 6.21 at the end of the lap, a second behind schedule. The last lap was a struggle (as it always is!) but even though I was really tiring my time was almost as fast as the second lap so I ended up with 9.37 (3rd place) which I was happy enough with. Conditions were n't ideal so hopefully the 9.30 barrier is achievable before the winter is over...