Manly Soft Sand Classic

So after a 'painful' 9 miler on Friday night, with my shins still giving me grief, a welcomed rest day on Saturday was taken in the lead up to the Manly soft sand half marathon. It's only 13 miles I thought, but 13 miles on soft sand. Hard bloody work as I was due to find out. With a 7am start, the crazy few of us all gathered down at the beach. Despite getting up at 5:30am, I still managed to be slightly late getting down there, and didn't have much time for a warm-up, something that I really felt in the first few laps.

At the last minute I also decided to run with my backpack on too, so stuff my kit and a 2 litre camelbac in there, and I was ready to rock and roll. It had been raining most of the night, so in theory, this makes things much easier when running on the sand. Had it not been raining, I'd have thought twice about taking the backpack, but my theory was, if I'm doing it in the actual race next year, then why not run with it now? So after starters orders, we all sped off, and to be fair, I did the first lap far too quickly, getting caught up in the event a little, but soon settled into a nice rhythm. The trick with soft sand running is to get yourself behind someone and let them do the work. The theory goes that it makes it that much easier to run in someone else's footsteps, because the sand is firmer and you're running in the path they have dug out. This was OK for me for around the first 3-4 laps, but then I suddenly found myself on my own, making out my own path, which means you work a lot harder.

However a couple of guys caught me up and we pretty much stayed together for the bulk of the race, taking it in turns to do the work. The weather as I mentioned was truly atrocious for the first 6-7 laps. Going away from the start line was OK, as the wind and rain was at our backs, but coming back in was horrible. Driving wind and rain and not having anyone else's footsteps to run in made the workload very very hard, especially with a backpack too! But we got through it, and I started to feel pretty good. This race was very different to Bondi, in that during the race there, a path started to be created, due to having 400 runners running along the same bit. As we were only 71, no real path was marked out, so you were pretty much running in new sand and trying to take the least line of resistance. With around four laps to go, there was me and another bloke, and he nestled himself right behind me (bastard!), only joking, I did it to someone at Bondi! But I thought there's no way in the world he's sitting behind me and then overtaking. So with around a couple of hundred metres to go, I pulled away from him and finished in a respectable 2 hours 4 mins, 37th overall. Not bad I thought, given it's only the third time I've run on soft sand too.

I really enjoyed this one, and it was really hard work. Makes me realise that in the six months leading up the the MDS next year, I should be doing one of these a week. Not only is it much better on the shins, which at the moment are taking a beating from the roads, but it's bloody good training for the MDS, given that we're in the Sahara!