This was a week of recovering from the Great Scottish Run and then racing the East District Cross Country 4x4k relays.

Recovery

I hadn’t particularly targetted the Glasgow Half, and just like I didn’t plan particularly much of a taper I didn’t plan to take any recovery time off.

Unfortunately I seemed to pick up a hip tightness/soreness, so while I showed up at Tuesday track, I took it easy and cruised around at the back. By Thursday I was up for a bit more effort, a fartlek session around the Meadows, but it was certainly feeling like effort, and I still had some foot issues I was worried about.

So then later into the week I ended up taking it easy like one would have expected the start of the week to look. And on Saturday I seem to have a cold, on Sunday morning I’m sitting in bed sneezing and sniffling until I need to hop on a bus to the meet-up point to head down to Peebles for the race.

Peebles

So I rocked up in Peebles for the East District relays feeling like I was carrying a couple of niggles if not injuries, not to mention the receding cold. Didn’t even feel like I was able to put in a decent amount of warm-up, running was tough.

I was the 2nd leg for our ‘B’ team, and didn’t really know what to expect for my first real XC experience (other than the braids a few years ago). As our 1st leg runner came in and I started off, I started slowly, and worked my way up the hill that came up almost immediately. Somehow running up this hill got me into a groove and things clicked, and I started to press onwards.

The ground was dry but rather “lumpy”, and there seemed to be no end of big screaming downhills. I quite enjoyed pushing it hard downhill, 4k is so short that there’s not much in the way of pacing to me, just hard all the way.

So as a first cross country experience, definitely found it a lot of fun, though to be honest I could do without logs to jump over.

Postscript

While the cold didn’t seem to affect me in the race (and it was nice and sunny, not at all the “typical” XC weather one imagines), I ended up being laid low with it the next day, and spending a sick-day sleeping it off.