With the Stratford half marathon now done and dusted, along with my long time goal of achieving a sub-90 minute half, it’s time to switch my attention to the East Midlands Grand Prix (EMGP) series.
The EMGP is a selection of 8 races of 5 mile, 6 mile and 10km’s around, well, the East Midlands. It all kicks off with the Silverstone 10km at the beginning of May, followed by the Blisworth 5 two weeks later on a Friday evening. The final race is the Rugby 6, some 9 weeks later on a Wednesday in mid-July. All races start at 19:45, which brings about challenges over fuelling and when to eat. As the races are quite geographically spread out, you’re generally not getting home until gone 10pm, which is no time for dinner. But you also don’t want a big meal beforehand either.
Anyway, it’s an excellent series of races of great quality at the front of the field. But it does also cater for the slower runner, and there’s a real mix of ability throughout. Aside from Silverstone, which is around the race track, and the Milton Keynes 10km to some extent, all races take place around country lanes, which mean hills!
It’s quite difficult to get any meaningful training in when you’re racing so often. If you want to perform well in the next race, you need time to recover from the last, and then you need a taper, which means hard sessions are difficult to squeeze in. The level of fitness in which you start the series in, is generally the level of fitness in which you finish.
With that in mind then, I’ve a bit of decision to make. I’m targeting the Milton Keynes 10km, the penultimate race, for an attempt at a sub-40. If we take my recent half marathon time, and plug that into an online calculator, my predicted 10km is, give or take, 40:10. Of course, this is slower than my target, and I don’t see how I can improve that forecast if I am racing almost every week.
I have come to the conclusion that I can either race, or train, and cannot do both. I have therefore taken the decision to put all of my eggs into one basket; to skip the rest of the series and concentrate solely on the MK 10km on 9 July. Fingers crossed it pays off.