Sunday 31 October 2010

Internet safety 101...




... if you are meeting up with someone you only know online, make sure you do so in a public place!

Today I met up with someone who feels like an old friend! Carol and I met at Running4Women about a year ago, but our efforts to meet in real life have been thwarted by logistics and illness. When Stephen had to drop out of the Festival Place 5k due to 'flu I emailed Carol and asked her if she wanted the place, after resisting for a little while she said yes and, at long last, we got to meet up!

After the Great South last week it was lovely to take part in a small race. This is the first year this race has been held, entries were limited to 350, but I don't think there were that many there today - hopefully more people will take part next year. We set off at 9am, I had positioned myself with all the scarily fast looking club runners near the front of the field, and started off much too fast - but hey, it's only 5k and I wanted to get a bit of speed at the start.

The route took us out through Festival Place shopping centre, and out and around a pond at Eastrop that I didn't know was there (to be honest I didn't know there was a place called Eastrop until this morning), back to Festival Place, passing Wagamamas, up past the Haymarket, along the road by MacDonalds (and back) then down into Festival Place again for a final circuitous route around both levels before finishing back where we had started at M&S. I am 99.99% certain that we didn't run a full 5k! I am not certain of my time, as I forgot to turn my Garmin on at the start, and then forgot to turn it off at the end - but results are being notified by post, so will have to wait and see! I did glance at the clock, but wasn't really concentrating, and the time seemed far too fast to be my time!

All in all a fun little race! Would have benefited from kilometre markers along the way, but the goodie bag is fun! The Lush bath bomb and £15 Wagamama voucher are possibly the best things I have ever had in a race goodie bag! Well done to Vicky, and everyone at Alton Sports for organising such an interesting race.

2 comments:

  1. You've never been "darn Eastrop"? shame on you ;-)

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  2. We used to go there all the time when I was little! :-)

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