Race Report

Spectrum Striders club handicap 5km - Friday 12th May 1995

Next week was the annual club handicap, I wasn't fully recovered from Boston but I always like this race. Look out for a momentous decision at the end of the report!

Morning all

tony here at cool and wet daresbury, last week's heatwave is now long gone :-(

Friday evening Spectrum Striders had its annual 5km handicap race, everyone is handicapped on time from recent racing form and guesswork, for the first time in 5 years I hadn't been lumbered with the handicapping so I thought I had a chance this year. My friend and training partner Bernard had been given the thankless job of handicapping this year he had set a new marathon pb on monday so he wasn't going to run this year.

It had been a rather cold day but at least the sun came out for the race, I got well wrapped up for warming up but unlike some of my wimpy clubmates I raced in (drs) vest and (boston marathon) shorts. I set off with ex-club chairman Alistair who can beat me over short distances, went off fairly hard but after a couple of minutes the bunch which set off 15s behind came charging past, I tried to go with him but I couldn't. Kept going hard and trying to shake off Alistair, at 3/4 mile another runner came past. After a mile we got into the park and I was slowly dropping Alistair, around halfway we passed club chairwoman Nicki and after a couple of short steep hills I finally got rid of Alistair. John caught me just before 2 miles, I hung onto him for the next half mile and we passed 2 more runners before some of the fast boys caught us and dragged John away. One of the runners was club champion Brian, he ran a 2h57 marathon (pb) on monday and he had raced on wednesday night as well, he is a racing fanatic! I used to be able to beat him as well :-(

At 2.5 miles I was pretty tired but I kept going hard as I knew there were some more slow runners ahead and more fast boys behind me but I kept my position. As usual in a short race like this I finished with loads left but at least I got under 20, finished in 19.56. 27th/33 on handicap and 16th/33 on net time. I was handicapped to run 19.00 but Boston took all the speed out of my legs, still it was almost a minute faster than last year when I did the handicapping and I finished 3rd from last.

After the race was the serious part of the evening :-) A club social evening in the local pub where we had a buffet and presented prizes and I showed my clubmates some of my embarrasing Boston marathon pictures :-)

Obrace winning. In my pre-daresbury workplace at Springfields near Preston I won the works monthly handicap a couple of times. The only race I've ever won off scratch was the ladies mile race at our club's annual track meeting last summer, they asked some of us slow men to run with the ladies to even up the numbers between the mens/ladies race and I just managed to beat one of the fast ladies :-)

ObBarney, I went to see my sister on friday afternoon and when I got there she was watching the purple agent of communism with my 2 year old niece, aaaaargh, it has crossed the atlantic :-( :-)

ObBigDecision. I have decided to become a full-time student again from this autumn, I will be doing a PhD in Chemistry at Cambridge University. My contract at daresbury ended at the end of march although they have found some money to keep me here for the rest of the summer. For the last year or so I've been applying for post-doc type jobs without a PhD and not too surprisingly I haven't been successful so as I want to stay in this science game (I don't want to have to get a proper job :-)) so its off for 3 years of interesting poverty and hopefully I will be Dr Bell from around 1998. It will be interesting being a full-time student again at the grand old age of 32.

what have I done.....? :-) :-(

tony bell A.M.T.Bell@dl.ac.uk crystallographer and marathon runner (but not necessarily in that order :-)) council for the central laboratory of the research councils daresbury laboratory, daresbury, warrington, cheshire, UK. WA4 4AD.

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