we delivered.... 1st place at the XC National Championship

Lately I have been absent from this blog because my mood was terribly low... no point to afflict others with the stories of my injuries, etc, etc...

I also know that I still have to make a detailed report about my visit to StrideUK and explain why I am inured and how I am trying to solve it (especially because the case might be interesting also for many other readers).

So this week I will try to clean up all the overdue...

without dwelling into all the details, the tightness in the glutes obviously ended up also "killing" my back...

so I basically did not run for 10-15 days while I was doing my sessions of acupuncture, massage, etc.

Now... the fact was that I was entered as one of the 6 man team for our club into the Hong Kong Cross Country Championship, to be held on October 2nd. So I really felt the pressure to be there and contribute points to the team. 

Moreover, the idea of our young club reaching the podium of the championship was giving me extra-motivation to give it a try.

After 15 days of no running, last Thursday I went for a jog and it was painful everywhere.... those 6km felt harder than a marathon and I was really thinking to quit running altogether because it did not really make sense to hurt my body further.

Friday so I ended up for another session of treatment at the local clinic and endured very deep tissue massage and a session of acupuncture with at least 10 needles placed in the back and in the leg...

Saturday I tried another easy jog and felt better, but running at 5'/km with the HR already at 150bpm did not really hint into a good state of fitness...

To patch up the different ailments, I took a good dose of pain-killers and muscle-relaxants to keep the glutes at bay for the race...

On Sunday morning, I really felt energized... we were there, with our "azzurro" jerseys, ready to take over to more established teams, but I felt confident because our club has a great depth and we had at least 4 runners capable of a Top10.

How many years without running a XC race...? at least 15... and at least 25 from my last team XC at school... 

On top of everything, the weather in the past few days has been awful, with heavy rains and a thypoon: so the course was MUDDY... really muddy, with large patches of flooded grass... honestly I was salivating to the idea to make a real XC, albeit my poor conditions...

Anyway, we start hard as in any XC... but I want to be really conservative because on that course the last lap is going to be very long . 

While in front my team mates were doing a terrific race, my personal challenge was to finish the 3 laps without blowing up too much and run as smarty as I could...

In the last lap the soil has totally loosened up and in some patches my feet went 20cm in the mud... in one section I peeped my Garmin and noticed that I was running at 4'/km while being at full effort to get out of the mud...

My honest performance was good enough to grab the 2nd place of the Master, well behind my teammate Curtis and few seconds ahead of the 3rd.

But the real deal was the awsome performance of David, Colin, Stefano...

They ended up 2nd, 5th and 6th overall with Curtis just few positions behind...

The race was won by the Kenyan Thomas Kiprotich while the Ethiopian Aboye was third.

So David really eventually pulled out a great race, after suffering for months for different ailments...

Our team won the Team Championship by a large margin versus TWAC and WAC , 2 of the most established clubs in HK.

Really a huge pride in winning it... we are a small club, just founded 14 months ago and we really emerged as a top local club in few months, thanks to the dedication of all the runners.

Team podium

Once the pain killers pills weathered off... I felt again awful, but the sweetness of the days really deserved it...

Masters' podium