I Won’t Sleep Tonight

The Hermitage 10k in Whitwick is, their website says, 'not a course for the feint-hearted’. Shouldn’t that be ‘faint-hearted’? Anyhow, obviously that’s where L and I were this morning with 230 other folk who also hadn’t got anything saner to do on a Sunday morning.

The first kilometre was largely flat and fast but then started the promised 5km of uphill, which was nice... taking us up to some of the best views in the area but personally all I saw was my feet shuffling along on the tarmac. We had some local runner advising the group I was in all the way around. At least I assume he was local and not just making it up. Saying: - use the road here, cross over here, the surface is better there, sharp turn coming up etc etc. This would all have been fine had he not been so bloody cheerful about it all.

The route took us past a place selling cream teas and the lass who was in the group threw out an open invitation. Which would have been nice but we knew it was just a ruse so that she could get ahead of us. She didn't need a ruse, she beat me anyway.

Even when we weren’t going unremittingly uphill, the small sections of down and flat were just a prelude to the next up. ‘Serious undulations’ I believe they call them around here.

Thankfully what goes up must come down (eventually) and a long steep downhill section hurtled us back down into Whitwick. The race website also promised a ‘sprint finish’, I must have missed that bit.

My time was around 2-3 minutes slower than my usual time over a flat 10k, which was to be expected I suppose. However once I took my shoes off I found another reason for this, which was much more sinister. I had bought some new running socks for this race and very nice they were too but now I noticed that they were marked with an ‘L’ and a ‘R’... I hadn’t had 'left' and 'right' socks since I was... err five? Isn’t that the age you move on to ones with the days of the week on?

Anyone how, needless to say I hadn’t noticed this and I’d got them on the wrong feet. No wonder I had such a slow race. What a basic error to make, I won’t sleep tonight.

We retire to the pub for some ale and a Sunday lunch. Then I can chill out and watch other people put themselves through it at the World Athletics. We get a couple of silvers courtesy of Lisa Dobriskey in the 1500m and the men's 4x400m relay team.

Dobriskey benefitted when two of the favourites had a bit of a ‘punch up’ on the last lap. Natalia Rodriguez of Spain pushed Ethiopian Gelete Burka to the track and then sprinted away to win. Dobriskey was third across the line but Rodriguez was of course disqualified promoting Dobriskey to second.

Dobriskey was oh so close to the gold medal losing out by just one hundredth of a second to Maryam Yusuf Jamal. I hope she had her socks on the right feet or else she won’t sleep tonight.



I’m pretty annoyed about the cricket. At 5.30 Australia still had five wickets in hand and the light, certainly in Nottingham, was fading so I thought that would be about it for the day and went to do something else, looking forwarded to spending the next day at work following the action.

So what do the buggers do, they take all five wickets in the next twenty minutes. That’s not cricket... or rather it is. Well done anyway.