Monday 5 January 2009

Reflections on 2008

Please forgive my lack of blogging. A mixture of nothing exciting to write about and trying to curtail my Internet addiction has kept me away from my PC and laptop over the holidays.

I hope everyone had a fabulous Christmas and New Year. I'm usually a big fan of the end of year festivities, but this time around my heart wasn't it. My focus is more on the happenings of this month. I think I'm the only person in the world who's glad to be back at work today. Possibly because I finish up for maternity leave on Friday :-)

Here are the key highlights from 2008

1)I ran a total of 1360 miles. Not bad considering I was only not pregnant for 3.5 months of the year.
2) I got a PB in every race I ran (pre-June). Well apart from the women's 10K in May when thought I was fatigued from over-training, but was in fact blissfully unaware that I was four weeks pregnant. I did, however, manage to match my 10K PB to the second!
3) Taking five minutes of half-marathon PB to finish in 1:42 in the Balloch to Clydebank half-marathon.
4) Finishing my sixth marathon (London Marathon) in 3:31:00 - taking nearly 18 minutes off my previous best.
5) Completing the 95 miles of a West Highland Way Race in June. I was aiming for under 24 hours but for various (and obvious!) reasons, I had only managed 30:48. I'll be back in 2010 for another bash at it.
5) Running the Paisley 10K at five months pregnant (54 mins) and the Loch Ness 10K at six months pregnant (57mins). Actually my last 10K was the same time as my first 10K back in 2002. So I'm glad to say even as a novice and a chubber, I've always broken the one hour mark.
7) Holding off hanging up my running shoes until I was 36 weeks pregnant.

Goals for 2009

1) The small matter of, erm, having a baby over the next couple of weeks. And for this reason, I have tried to keep my goals simple and flexible.
2) I'm itching to get back out running, so I hope to back out by the end of February.
3) My first race (don't quote me on this) back will be the Glasgow Women's 10K in May. It was my first ever road race, so it's a bit of a tradition for me. 2009 will be race number eight.
4) For reasons which escape me, I have signed up for the 43 mile Devil o' The Highlands Race in August. My goals for this are - Bronze: actually make it to the start. Silver: complete in less that 8.5 hours and gold: finish in under eight hours. I ran the course as a training run in May this year in 8.5 hours, so hopefully I should achieve silver or gold.
5) Other races I would like to aim for are the Great Scottish Run (September) and the Loch Ness Marathon (October). I'm not going to set myself any time aims. See point one.
6) Support Sonic to a sub 18:30 hour finish in the WHWR. I firmly believe he can do it. I just need to make sure we get that angel child I ordered :-) Oh and to stop him racing off like a rat up a pipe.

Happy new year y'all. Hope 2009 brings lots of PBs and injury-free miles.

6 comments:

John Kynaston said...

Great goals for 2009 - I hope you achieve them all.

John

Rachel Jayne Stevenson/Rogers said...

What a fab year you have had. Brilliant! Here's to 2009 x

Davie said...

Happy new year to you, Sonic and baby Consani. What do you mean nothing to write about?
Anyway, what's Marco's excuse?

Steph said...

Well done for 2008, you can take it easy for the next couple of weeks but we will expect an appearance at the Whinney Hill xc at the end of the month.

Silke said...

A Happy & Healthy New Year to you and Marco and the little one who is due to arrive soon. I hope all goes well with the delivery. We'll probably miss the news as we will be away skiing.
By the way the Inverness half has got the right age group (M45!) so we will probably do this one.
Silke

N.D. said...

A great 2008 and great year ahead! I'll be thinking of you as your due date nears!