SUNDAY 22nd MARCH
NoEAA NORTHERN 12 STAGE ROAD RELAYS
[Leg 9] 4.6m/road
WYTHENSHAWE PARK, MANCHESTER

Bad news came my way on the email front just a few days before the event. Team 'B' had been scrapped due to injuries. Bloody hell... injuries? Tell me about it!
Now we had just one team out, gone was my chance to canter round in a relatively painless fashion. 
Naturally I was now compelled to try and salvage as respectable a time as I could muster for the team without banging on about my niggles too much. Runners with excuses can be very tiresome but we are all guilty of it from time to time, as indeed I will be on many occasions throughout these pages. News was on my arrival that even without the club's road talisman Ben Fish, or rising star Karl Billington, the big guns of Tighe, Bridge, Nuttall, Thornton, Cornthwaite and Bradshaw had elevated Blackburn to 7th. Definitely no pressure then!
By the time my leg 9 came along we had slipped to 9th place although Paul Guinan and Scott Monk ran well and didn't lose much time.
Two contrived laps of this flat parkland later and I was gutted at having ran so slowly and yet having to work so hard for it. I coasted through the first couple of miles quite comfortably and when I expected to be able to kick on slightly, a lack of high tempo running in recent times took it's toll and I seemed to start going backwards. I was hanging on right to that finishing line just to sustain what felt like nothing more than a strong jogging pace. At least I had only lost us one placing at the time and in the end the team finished a credible 11th overall which wasn't a bad return when they were carrying baggage like myself. A most unwanted statistic for me personally though was that my time stuck out like a sore thumb as the slowest time for that 4.6 mile longer leg of all the top twenty teams. Worst still, my achilles tightened up significantly soon after and was screaming for a few days afterwards. No chance of resuming training the day after, or all week as it would turn out. A Three Peaks recce run the following Sunday was also looking more and more unlikely. Another valuable week had been lost. 
Time: 27:16