As hundreds of fellow ultrarunners head for a frozen
Wendover, I am instead sitting on my comfy and warm sofa with my packed bags
still piled up in the hallway.
Walked through the pros and cons of skipping the race:
- Con – I’m a runner. Not turning up to an event that I have committed to, which is also part of a series I’m planning to race through the year, directly conflicts with this.
- Pro – I am actually sick. I had a doctor’s note and drugs and everything. The combination is causing some dehydration, poor quality sleep and stomach distress.
- Con – Dehydration, poor quality sleep and stomach distress are pretty a pretty usual combination for the period of a taper and race.
- Pro – This is supposed to be a race for me, not the usual long run in the beautiful wilds. If I cannot confidently push myself, I’m better off playing safe.
- Can – It means I can tell the people who know about the race how well I did. Most of them will have no idea what would be a good result.
- Pro – There is a small chance that I might not complete the race. It is a point to point a couple of hours away and getting back from one of the checkpoints is likely to be a pain in the arse.
- Con – Even if I jog the thing, it would be a result for the race series and might be useful if I have to pull out of one of the later races unexpectedly.
- Pro – I would get the whole day back to do something more useful with my time.
- Con – I will actually spend most of that time mulling over sacking off this race and generally feeling sorry for myself.
- Con – I still have to run today anyway. Not having this long run does somewhat interfere with the training plan for the next.
- Pro – I won’t have to clean all of my kit?
- Con – I do have quite a lot of unwatched stuff on my TiVo.
Anyway. I’m 90% sure
that it was the right decision to not race today. I shall be spending the next few days thinking
mainly about that 10%.
Time to let the race organiser know that he has a spare slot that he will not have time to utilise.
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