A great day out and it was wonderful meeting so many Free Spirits either again or for the first time. It was particularly good to see Mike Channin and Tanya who unexpectedly turned up to spectate.
I am now glad that I chose to enter 2 smaller races at Evesham and Cardiff this year. The experience gained at these events was invaluable and helped me control my nerves. I had the good fortune to meet Anna Bailey just before my race and we had a quick chat about Malvern and a moan about the race being 5 minutes late.
The start went well for a change and I am sure Roger Bangay would have been happy to see I hit my target pace (1:49) within a few strokes. I found it difficult to maintain a consistent speed. Occasionally I would be hitting 1:47 which panicked me so I would then slow down too much and the speed would drop to 1:51/1:52. After 500m I became more settled but the dry atmosphere was beginning to bother me and at 1000m I was beginning to doubt whether I could finish. There was no way I was going to handle down at BIRC though so I just carried on. By 1500m I was looking at about 7:20 and didnt know if I had a sprint finish. At 250m to go the doubts disappeared and I started to crank up the pace hitting 1:37/1:38, finishing in 7:13.7 a pb by 1.2 seconds.
Rowing at about 1:50 for 1500m and relying on my sprint finish is not going to get me much further now and I really need to speed up the first 1500 if I am going to progress towards sub 7. So its back to the Pete Plan this week with the horrible 4x2000 planned for Thursday. I will then take Friday off and have another go at my seasons best 10k (40:12) and maybe even push for a pb (sub40).