Kickboxing, football, 10k. A personal triathlon in a personal weekend.

Running Vampires

Being a sport junkie is not too difficult, especially in the weekend. All you have to do is just forget about getting drunk, avoid hangovers (and if you don't drink you'll be ok), do not eat heavy food and be at least a bit fit. Ok, it's not that easy.
Kickboxing on friday evening and saturday is already quite tiring, but after a week of hard work (with sport in the evenings and sometimes jogging in the morning) there is nothing better than kicking some guy's (or girl's) ass. Even if at the end of the lesson it's me who usually get more punches and kicks in the faces, but no pain no gain.
I'm a gentleman, I wouldn't hurt a girl. Or at least almost not eveytime...

Football sunday morning was even more interesting. Big match against a highly disappointing top-of-the league team. You can click here to read the report, on the team's website. We won quite easily, 4-2, and the score could have been much bigger. Running 90 minutes up and down was a good training for the final sporting event: the Nike RunLondon Nocturnal 10k (cool name, uh?).

Usually I find running 10k more difficult that running a full marathon. In my life, so far, I've run 8 marathons, maybe 4 or 5 half marathons and only few 10k. Maybe that's because I see the 10k as nothing more than a training, and I don't push myself.

I've never run before a nocturnal race, and, at the end of November, the temperature in London is quite low. But because just the day before I've been accepted to the London Marathon (after 3 years of trying!) I thought that it was a good chance to check out how London can organize a race.

All the contestants (around 30.000) were splitted in 5 waves, starting each 30 minutes. Being in the wave 4, it meant I was starting at 8.00pm, almost an hours and half after the first...at least I had enough time to warm up, thanks to the warmup trainers shouting and screaming exercies on the big screen.

The route was very flat, well lit, a bit wet but, excluding the interesting Tower Bridge bit (between the 5th and the 7th km) incredibly dull. I was positevely surprised by the amount of people watching the race in the middle of a cold night, but with 30 thousand people running probably the amount of families and friends was quite big...

My legs were a bit stiff after the football match in the morning, and the final time was nothing special: 45m 29s, with, strangely, a second half much faster than the first: 21.04!