View Workout (Matthew Simonson)

Return to Log

Dash for the Splash!

February 2, 2020 (Morning)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
The photos are on Insta. Or, if you're Anthony, check your email. This race was as cross country as it gets.

300 of us lined up on Wimbledon Common at 9:30 sharp, with at least one of us having arrived scarcely 15 minutes before and having spent the better part of that quarter-hour on a futile quest for a spike wrench (apparently a standard one can't accommodate spikes over half an inch long? Who knew?). The starter gave some announcements about how the course was muddier than last year, which was a good thing, since people hadn't thought it muddy enough. Then, almost as an afterthought, calmly intoned "go" and we were off. I had placed myself in the second row, right behind a high school girl who looked rather fast, but I soon found myself in 16th place as we entered the woods a quarter-mile in. Over the next mile, I moved up steadily, my eye on finishing in the top 10. We splashed through a jolly good many puddles, some of them past our ankles, and then started up a drier stretch known as The Toast Rack. It's called this because it's a straight trail closely bounded by two wire fences, thus resembling the wire rack used for holding toast upright when serving it. It was on this stretch that I moved definitively into 8th place, enough insurance I hoped to stop fretting about holding onto a top 10 spot. In any case, the 7th man was barely within sight and gaining ground on me steadily, so it was really all I could do given that I was already breathing heavily and feeling it in my quads. The 9th and possibly 10th guys were hanging on though, so I made a concerted effort to ditch them on the downhill the followed, hoping that if I opened up a wide enough gap I would no longer be an effective mental target to motivate them. Up until now, the course was the same as it had been 3 weeks ago, but then in the woods, the flags and cones took a wild turn to the right and started heading back uphill again, away from the start/finish area. And here, things really started to get interesting. The path was narrow enough to feel the prick of the thorn bushes on either side and though we were higher up now, there was still a hearty proliferation of puddles. The fields at the top by the halfway mark (5k) were soggy as well.

Luckily, my inclination to go splashing in puddles whenever possible, a la Corbin, has its benefits. I soon confirmed that, at least in this type of soil, the ground tends to be far firmer beneath a puddle than along its muddy edge. Therefore, I actually had much better footing going straight through the puddles than I did going around them. I was running in my spikes without pins in them (a pity, given that I had ordered a set of the longest spike pins known to man explicitly for this purpose), and this gave me sufficient traction most of the time, except on the soggy grass and the uphills. There was one set of hills in particular, known as The Alps, that were challenging neither due to their length nor pitch, but because the ground was so thoroughly sodden and already strewn with muddy bootprints. I found myself turning my feet sideways for better tracking and chopping my stride considerably so that for several seconds I was proceeding slower than a walk on flat grounds. But I got up them nonetheless without falling and soon was coursing downhill at full tilt.

The best part of the course, in my opinion, was a woodsy stretch that had us leaping back and forth across a creek, hurdling over fallen trees, and occasionally making sharp turns down treacherously narrow corridors. I might add that all of this was downhill, so one could, in theory, take on these obstacles at a dashing speed if one dared. I dared. Of course. There's nothing in running so delightful as a raw steeplechase. Its ceremonial cousin, tamed for the track, pales by comparison like a die-hard two-miler forced to do 16 laps around the PG Sportsplex, longing for the outdoor freedom of the spring. That I said, I do love the 3000m steeplechase, but I still content a true steeplechaser hasn't lived until she has flung herself across logs, streams, and brambles, thinking all the while of the competitors hot on her heels.

Speaking of streams, the climax of the course comes right at the end, when competitors cross a bridge, proceed ploddingly for 400m through a sopping wet field, and then cross back over the stream, "sans pont" as the French say ("sin un puente" to the Eduardo/Yka/Maribel crowd). Makng a sharp turn out of the field through the gap in threes that the cones indicated, I instantaneously found myself hurtling full tilt down a muddy embankment with a chorus of course marshals and fans urging me on. "It's quite deep!" one of them shouted as I felt my body cantilever from within 20-degrees of upright to being parallel to the water. It entered the chilly brook with an innovative approach best described as a cross between a belly-flop and a faceplant, one that would undoubtedly earn the first prize in the pentathlon pool entry competition at Manidoken. The crowd let out a shreik of horror mixed delight that instantly took me back to my college days when I had caught my toe on the top of a steeple barrier at Little Threes and was whipped headlong into the water pit, narrowly avoiding being trampled by the Amherst and Wesleyan runners following in close pursuit. At the time, I had been able to burst out of the water with a hearty pushup summoning a great ovation from the crowd. This was due to the fact that a track's water pit is sloped, going from waist depth where my feet were to ankle depth where my hands found themselves. This time, with no solid ground within reach, I immediately plunged my arms in and began swimming. The reaction from the rabble, I might add, was similarly enthusiastic. Seconds later, I scampered up the far bank, declining to make use of the 10-foot long stick that one of the course marshals proffered, and instead pulling myself up by tree roots. I emerged at the top of the 7-foot high embankment and immediately dashed off for the finish, bobbing and weaving ever-so-slightly in my course in order to savor all the puddles one last time.

I came across in 8th place, where I'd been since the second mile. I have no idea what my time was, but on a course like this, that is hardly the point. The point, rather, is that each finisher is awarded a tray of sticky toffee pudding with a sticker on the box saying "You Dashed the Splash!" I stuck around to help clean up afterward, in part because my club here (Thames Hare and Hounds) was hosting and I felt some measure of obligation to do my bit. But also, I must admit, so I could earn/snatch a second pudding :)