Winners are Grinners!

I won I won I won I won I won I Won I Won

How exciting a day can you get?

Turned up at BRRC and met with the most disgusting weather imaginable for Brisbane. It was cold and extremely windy. Most runners sat in their cars until the last minute to escape the biting wind and prevent themselves from being blown over. Seriously you had to lean forward just to walk anywhere.
My husband had come for his very first run with the BRRC (normally he just watches) and was giving me killer looks as we sat in the car hoping the wind would die down.

Eventually race excitment got the better of us and we got out to go and register. I signed up for the Novice 14km and Allanf or the open 7km.

A quick two laps of the grassy oval to warm up (and I mean WARM up - my hands were numb). Al didn't start until 15mins after me so he stole my warm jacket and I lined up with Tesso and Karisma in my tracksuit jacket (no way was it coming off).

The gun went off and so did Tess and I. The first km was really good. Felt like a warm up and we got into a rythmn fairly quickly. Out to the turn around and back past the finish - that meant 3km done. We were doing just under 5min/km even splits so I was happy to maintain that. After the turnaround we realised we were the first women and the competition was about 200m behind. Around the 4km mark my leg felt fantastic - totally lost it's tightness and started to want to run. It was here that I first realised I was going to finish this 14km run today if it killed me.

My longest run since Canberra and certainly not one that I had trained for but with Tesso chatting to me as I panted along it was a great deal of fun and I was just ecstatic to be running.

At the 10km mark I was both very very excited and very very tired. The really strong headwind was making us lean into the wind and if it stopped suddenly I would have fallen on my face! It was very discouraging. However the finish line was around the corner and Tess kept her mantra up "you can win this clairie you can win this".
As soon as the finish line was in sight my brain said 'lets do this' and my legs kicked into gear for a sprint finish. The funny thing was with the wind and my tiredness it felt like I was going fast but not getting anywhere.

I crossed the finish line one very happy chicky - thanks mostly to my bestest runnin pal Tesso.

It was great to see Skizzik come down to see us all finish and hubby had done well with his 7km race too. It was fun to cheer Hannah into a sprint finish as she crossed the line with a Shultzy - a male runner. So great day all round.

Did I mention I got a trophy? Well it is a ceramic cup. The tea just tastes soooooo good out of it. But of course now it will be washed and polished and put behind protective glass..... so this is what it feels like to win :)