The Indoor Inter Area affair

Training for the big day

So, here we are again, having recovered from the trauma of the sight of my daughter smashing her front teeth and praying I don't have to visit A&E again in the next fortnight. I put that weekend behind me, looked forward to the inevitable dentist visit and thanked my luck that facial rebuilds are free for students, though I was less sure about the Welsh rugby outcome against the French after the Irish debacle. 

The week's training consisted of more gym work with speed sessions on Tuesday and Thursday. Well, I say speed sessions, they turned out to be just training nights where I ran as fast as conditions allowed, which was not that fast in reality. The gym sessions seemed to go OK despite me tweaking the back of my knee doing calf raises, but the speed was clearly absent. 

My earlier attempt at 200m indoors had resulted in a really crap time, so Thursday's session began with a 200m time trial in apparent preparation for running it in the Indoor Inter Area on the forthcoming weekend. The idea was to blitz the previous 28.93 clocking to prove things were going in the right direction, unfortunately, even though I had a following breeze and had banished the fridge bear, I was slower (29.03). So I uttered some magic incantations known only to the Druids of Wales that adequately expressed my thoughts, apologised to the nearby throws coach and went for a lie down. 

The following 'speed' work did nothing to make me believe that I was about to run a season's best over 60m as well, so I went home in search of spiritual guidance. 

Friday, and an amazing defensive performance from the Welsh rugby team saw them well and truly stuff the French against what most of us expected. I celebrated in the usual way, a couple of large single malts from Wales' only distillery at Penderyn. So spirits were raised for the Inter Area, although the Welsh team was found to be full of gaps again on the day. 

The Inter Area match

 I was expecting to do the 60 and the 200, but ended up with the 60, long jump and high jump. Secretly I was quite happy to give the 200 to Ian Broadhurst in order to avoid further humiliation.The long jump sort of went OK, I started with two decent No Jumps, my habit of toeing the plasticine had returned , then finished with 4.46m (a safe one) and 4.59m for 6th, having finally found where my run up had disappeared to and exactly what I was supposed to do with my legs. Very little height was being generated, as Tom Phillips' photo depicts, but that is something I can work on.

So, to the 60m. I went to warm up and didn't see many faces that I recognised, and I started to think that this was going to be OK after all. Oh, when will I ever learn! When I went to what passes for a call room at Lee Valley, half of the cream of British M50 sprinting sidled up, including World Champion Pat Logan. Such was the quality of the race, Pat was 2nd and I was a dim and very distant 7th (last) in an appalling 8.55 seconds. Didn't I get a lesson in sprinting! 

I sulked until the high jump, where I was not expecting much different. But I got a new seasons best of 1.35m out of it in 5th. However, the high light of the competition was watching the battle between Alan Leiper and John Mayor, the advantage switched to and fro ending with them both clearing 1.60 but John just edged it on count back. 

The Welsh women's team did quite well, finishing a credible 3rd, whilst the fellas were 6th, which was our overall position as well. Ho-Hum.