Greenwich Christmas 10km #MyMoments

Last year, I kinda missed out on all the festive fitness. The Team Naturally Run (TNR) girls got together for a run on Saturday morning which meant that I was either working or teaching. But for 2014 the Greenwich (5km or) 10km on Sunday 21st December was the race of choice.

I’d had this race booked in for weeks and already decided in my head that I would run the 5km option (you choose on the day). However, when I put my half marathon training schedule in my diary I was due to run 6miles (approx 10km) on this day for a slow “long run”. So that was decided for me.

I rocked up at the start line about with 15 mins to spare where I met the other TNR girls and got myself into costume. I was running as a Christmas Tree. I’m trying this year with the festive spirit! RunThrough, who organised the race, did say it would start promptly at 10am. It did. I dumped my bag and found the girls at the start line (oh and set up my GPS watch of course). My aim was to run the course at a pace of 6:24 min/km. Pretty casual, but I didn’t anticipate the hills that were on the course.

From my recollection, there were two ugly hills and one which we only ran half way up. The course was two laps of this route. The hills killed my pace which confused me; it took my average race pace down which meant I ran faster at other times to make up for it. I genuinely wasn’t sure if this was what I was supposed to do!

Although I didn’t need my phone to track my run I still had it as I had downloaded the last two episodes of the podcast Serial to listen to. This was the best “company” ever. The episodes had me wondering, laughing and in an entirely different world. If you haven’t already gotten hooked on Serial do so now before series 2 comes out in 2015!

I got to the finish line and felt pretty damn good. The reception from the TNR girls at the sideline put a big smile on my face too! A pudding shaped medal was my reward…and somehow I missed all the mince pies!

Photo Credit: Kiera 🙂

Photo Credit: RunThrough

Photo Credit: RunThrough

So that’s one week of half marathon training in the bag 🙂 and I’m happy! I’m slowly getting used to using the watch instead of my phone – I miss the voice feedback and cheers via social media from friends though. I’m also getting used to actually training and running at specific paces. I think this will be massive for me! 

Check out the ‘Train with Elle’ page for the events you can find me at! I’m using small local races as my long runs on the weekend! 

Have you started training for your spring events yet?! 

Elle 🙂