Sunday 4 December 2016

RACE 11 - Zombies, Run! Autumn Virtual Race


Apologies everyone, I completely forgot to blog about race 11. Back in October, I was on holiday in London with my family and took the opportunity to fit in this race. On arrival in the city I had the pleasure of meeting up with a fellow Runner 5, with whom I had been in touch on the ZRVR forum. Also called Matt, he gave me a great running tour of the city sights over a 10km trot. That was a fab way to see the landmarks (albeit mad busy with tourists to dodge) and gave us both the opportunity to listen to one of the training missions as we ran round.

The following Saturday, Matt had arranged for any interested Runner 5's to meet in Hyde Park to race together. I joined around a dozen others at the Statue of Achilles (very appropriate) in time for an 11am start. Some of the staff from Six to Start (the company that makes Zombies, Run!) also joined us, both to run and to (very kindly) watch the bags. As such, I had the privilege of running with the actor who plays Sam Yao, one of the key and longest-standing characters in the game!

Some were running 5k, most were running 10k, we all ran at different paces. Heading off into the park we managed to keep in sight of one another for a short while, but slowly drifted apart and took slightly different paths. A slightly fast starting pace had us all easing into our regular paces further into the run than we'd all expected. The day was good though - not too warm, but far from cold, and dry. As such, good pace was made although I managed to get lost (it's a very big park), ending up on the wrong side of the Serpentine than I'd intended. No bother, I just invented a different ending path and pushed hard for a good finish.

Having had a rubbish running summer, due to work and art exhibitions taking up all my time, I was off pace in this race. I eventually completed in an ok time of 54m 38s, but it just goes to show... in April I completed it over 3 minutes quicker on a course with over 60m more climbing (Hyde Park is pretty much flat). Still, that placed me 216th on the leaderboard of 845 runners.

Afterwards we all met at the Serpentine Grill for lunch together, race chit-chat and a lovely medal presentation from the team at Six to Start. Everyone was really nice and I had a great morning with them, hoping to return to race together again sometime :)

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