Hard Months, Big Rewards: This Week in Team Orange

It’s your weekly round up folks. What have the team been up to this week?

I’ll start by saying sometimes running is tough, the training is hard and you feel like you are being left behind. Missed sessions, down on points, feeling glum... honestly, keep going, keep showing up. You never know what is around the corner.

Victoria will be the first to admit the last few months have been a struggle from a training point of view. None of it was her fault, sometimes life gets in the way. Work, illness, niggles.

But she continued to try her best, hit the key sessions when she could, and on Sunday she got her reward. A new half marathon PB of 1:41:54 at Dorney Lake, and 3rd female overall. If ever there was a reminder why we should keep trying, this was it. What a run!!

A day earlier saw our first PB of the weekend, and that went the way of Jane at Hastings parkrun, 26:13 her new best. Relatively new to the team, can the coach take much credit? Hell yeah, all me of course 😂 and a little bit of hard work from Jane.

Up and over Galley Hill, hundreds of runners gathered for the Bexhill Remembrance Races. Su was our only representative in the 5k, overcoming a sore hip to run a very respectable 30:53.

In the 10k we had 6 runners and 2 new PBs. Martin, who is having a fantastic year, broke his 10k PB for the 2nd time in just 7 days, running 47:04.

Abbi, hot off her recent half marathon success and now on her 2nd full plan with the team, was rewarded with a new 10k personal best of 1:09:35.

Klare was pacing Sue W, who beat her target time to clock 57:29. Klare was 4 seconds faster (all these Strava times, I should add), so perhaps she didn’t leave Sue behind at the finish. That didn’t happen, right? Louise M was also running the 10k and produced a strong performance to cross the line in 1:06:16.

And Gemma, who is new to the team, part of the Wednesday TWR crowd and just starting her running journey, ran a very good time of 1:14:30.

We had two runners tackling the half marathon. Ben, who goes from strength to strength, ran his fastest half marathon in over 8 years, coming home in 1:43:37. Class.

Carl, who promised me it would be an easy run (I’ve heard that before, from other members of the team), kept it close enough to Zone 2 (just) to come home in 2:08:54 🙄

We have two Laura T’s on the team now, just to add to the confusion, though not as bad as when I had about 5 Sue’s and 4 Kirsty’s. I’m sure I messaged the wrong person 50% of the time in those days. It was Laura T of Ely Runners who raced this weekend. A slight calf niggle meant it wasn’t her fastest 10k, but I’m sure we can all agree 46:42 is very impressive. That came at the George Munday 10k.

What next? Well, we have the Winter 5K on Sunday and then the autumn race season is probably behind us. Sad times as we knuckle down for some cold weather training. Remember, what we do in the next 4 to 6 weeks will have a big impact on our spring race times, so now is the time to start building for your goals in March and April.