BUCS 2014

BUCS 2014

Saturday morning, after finding the Durham minibus and dumping my bag with dirty kit from Portugal I had some hours to cover everyone in purple colours for Durham and get ready for my race. I was feeling incredible unenthused after my week of quality training, just wishing to be back in Portugal with Lillomarka.

Florence, who has a slow recovering stress fracture in her foot came to support with her crutches seeing as she lives practically on the area.

As expected I was really tired from my previous weeks training but I persevered even though the start was aalllll up-hill! After flying past control two and having to double back I quickly got in the flow of things and felt good until the last loop which took us back up the hill...at the top of the moor the last stretch was back down wooooh!! Which I absolutely loved! bombed it down and came back in first waiting for Charlotte who started 4minutes after me. She came in pretty close to four minutes after and got the splits back found she’d taken the lead by two seconds.

Aine, also in Durham did extremely well meaning the girls managed to collate a fair amount of points, in the boys we did not do as well with our best man: Peter coming in 8 minutes down. The head of sport at Durham also came to watch the race, or came to support as you can't really watch it adding a bit of pressure! It was a bit frustrating then that we hadn't done a bit better but we put the races behind us and looked forward to the social and relay the following day.

We stayed on the floor of a sports hall and the social was a typical mess with people still wandering in from the clubs after three. Therefore the night sleep wasn't at all the best preparation but everyone was in the same boat. The boys, started first, which always annoys me as the girls then have less people to cheer them on -_-. After probably the worst warm up ever (at least I attempted one!) we got ready to race with myself, Kirstin and Lucy Haines (Florence's little sister who is absolutely rapid!!) took the lead.

I came back in second place, (the relay courses were pretty gaffled) I had the medium distance one, handing over to Aine and then Katherine Bett. We finished in fourth, just outside the podium but I absolutely loved the race. It was so much fun and so so fast which I loved! Overall Durham came fifth which I was pretty disappointed with as we had come 3rd the year before...but we will just have train harder and boss it next year.