The Lincoln 10k Run

Time was when I trundled over the hill from Newcastle to South Shields on a couple of occasions, participating in the Great North Run, and I couldn't get anywhere near breaking the two hour barrier, however hard I trained. I'm just not built for running, big boned, awkward gait and the worst hand:eye coordination I have ever come across, so naturally I never excelled in sports, pub or otherwise.

Whenever I did a half marathon, I busted myself up really badly, and endured the most awful muscle aches for up to four days afterwards, so I decided to give myself the rest of my life off and concentrate on shorter distances that weren't so injurious, and it was 2001 that I first galloped round the Lincoln 10k. It was a record time, too, just over 52 minutes, but it was canine-assisted, as I was towed round the course by a fifteen-month-old cobrador that could have put an Iditarod-hardened huskie to shame. I had a few subsequent races that clocked appalling times as slow as 57 minutes, but this year turned into a grudge match, so draconian training was called for, combined with an Indian-delayed Lent.

Basically, my lovely boys, Sam (19) and Jack (18) both reckoned they could beat each other, and never even gave a thought that this old gimmer could be in the chocolates. As already established, Sam is at Manchester, and despite being a traitor to his genes and working hard academically, spent many hours in the gym and out on the track. Jack had done his basic training at the Army Foundation College at Harrogate a year before, and although he opted out (to a mixture or relief and regret) after the hard bit, was as hard as nails and incredibly fit. Like everything else in his current sloth-like life, training was too much of a hassle, and he knew he could just wing it on the day, Sunday 30th March 2008.

The weather building up to the race was a shocker, complete with snow for Easter Sunday a week earlier, and even the Saturday was a bleak day, but the Lincoln 10k is a charmed race, and the sun has never failed to shine for every one of my five entries.



The official race photographer was Ellie, who if her future is in the field of photography must learn to be a little less economic with the shutter, as herewith is the total of her day's work

Despite the sunshine, there was a cutting north wind, and the start was delayed by twenty minutes as some confrontational shit was refusing to move their car from a pinch point on the course. Eventually we shuffled up to the line........




..... and then we were away, a forced slow start, but probably not too bad for that fact. We had already decided we would run independently, and in the melee of the start, we were instantly parted and I honestly didn't know where they were, although I fancied Jack had already made a dash for it.

Fortunately, the course is around the old town on top of the hill, and does not feature that ball-busting hill up to the cathedral. There are still some spirit-sapping inclines, however, and the first one features in the council estate where everyone seems to run through fear rather than competition. I had started the race with my trusty old greeny-yellow biking jacket to keep my temperature up, but two miles in my thermostat opened and off the outer casing came. I ran with it screwed up in a ball, hoping to see Ellie mid-course and give it to her.

That bit of the plan worked, as she shouted to me, and I cut across the course to throw my jacket at her feet. It was at this point she took her last photo of the day, this unedifying snap of my dispatch.



Two things happened at this point. Firstly, neither Ellie or Jane recognised the fact I had delivered my heirloom garment to Ellie's feet, and coolly walked on and left it there, lost to me forever, and secondly, Jane shouting 'Go Jack! Go Greg!' And there he is in the picture, in the red shirt, the hairy little individual, trying to run my race!

Well, I didn't look round then or until the two furlong mark. I realised that he was hanging on to me, and we were both running my race. So I stepped up the pressure a bit, just at the 5 mile bit where fatigue is biting. The dispiriting thing about the Lincoln course is that it twists back on itself, so whilst you feel you are running the race of your life, the elite runners are cantering past in the other direction, having already done a mile and a half more! There is a flipside to this in that when I reached that very bit on the home straight, the backmarkers were running hard, so I must have been in the top half of the field.

When I rounded the cathedral for the heartbreaking hill climb over cobbles up to the finish line in the castle, I had a hard look back, and Jack wasn't there waiting to pounce, so I carried on running the best race I could. On previous occasions, I seemed to be able to summon up reserves of energy at the end to overtake dozens of people at the death, but this time there was nothing extra left, and the late-surgers were going past me. I was really pleased about that, as it meant I had measured the pace well, hadn't gone too slow or too fast earlier, just a solid performance throughout, a bit like a racing car running out of fuel on the finish line.

Endurance sports make me a bit mad, and I was suffering delusions in the closing stages that I had run a sub-50 time (I don't wear a watch) so I was devastated to see the clock on the line report '55.37'. How could this be, I had just trained for a month, and really pulled my tripe out? The good thing about these modern day races is that many of them, including Lincoln, use a timing chip, so one's time is measured between the lines, rather than from the gun, recorded on the clock. The bad thing is one has to wait until the paper comes out the next day to get the actual times.

My beef with these races is that organisers have starting pens based on expected finish times. Why, then, are there pantomime cows and pub landlords with collecting buckets immediately behind the Ethiopian elite, whom do nothing but slow down serious (or in my case Corinthian) runners? Are they seriously worried about donor-fatigue in crowds lining the course? I am justified in my fulminating, in that my gun place was 1,547th and my place between the lines was 1,541st, so I had overtaken only 6 people during the race.

The most important statistic for me was 54 minutes and 3 seconds corrected time, my second personal best, and without a tug.

1541 2432 Gregory Dunn M 00:55:37 1547 00:54:03
1686 2433 Jack Dunn M 00:56:56 1723 00:55:25
1931 2434 Samuel Dunn M 00:58:53 1981 00:57:21

Needless to say the lovely boys are livid that the old man kicked their arse, but I fear next year I will have to retire toothless to the edge of the herd as the young bucks rob me of my crown!