Salford 10k - 2018 Championship Race #2

On a mild, slightly overcast Good Friday morning, 13 brave NWFPAC souls gathered in the salubrious surroundings of Salford Sports Village. 'Salubrious' and 'Village' may lead those of you unfamiliar with the area to believe this was a lovely little leafy hidden gem in the suburbs of Manchester. Oh to have those illusions shattered!

When I got there, I was quite surprised to not see barbed wire around the 'Sports Village' given the surroundings. I have to say the route took in a quite a lot of what some may generously describe as industrial art, but I would call derelict buildings, a cemetery and what has become known to many as 'Benefits Street'.

Full credit to the organisers though, it was well run with plenty of marshals around offering encouragement and controlling traffic and a water station half way. I also have to give the team credit for making the best of the resources to hand, my personal favourite being the attachment of a 'Caution Runners' sign to an old abandoned washing machine, working with what you have at its finest!

Anyhow, on to the race itself where a total of 630 runners took part. A sterling effort was put in by everyone (with the exception of myself, but I'm citing a chesty cough as the reason), and a number of PB's were achieved on what Salford Harriers described as an 'undulating course' (pancake flat is how we that run in Oldham would describe it, the most undulating bits were the speed humps in the road, but bless them for thinking that...)

Kudos in particular to James Savage on a fantastic NWFPAC win in an awesome PB time of 32 mins 18 secs placing 12th overall, to Byron Edwards on his NWFPAC second placing (go team Run on the Bank) who also achieved an astonishing 69 second PB - absolutely fantastic running Byron (yes I'm biased, as he is carrying me in the team comp so far 😁), to Rob Fairbanks for making his NWFPAC debut today and also shaving c. 20 secs off his 10k PB, and to John Williams on a new 10k PB. Yet again bringing up the rear way behind everyone else was myself...this is becoming a habit that I'm really not happy about! And we all picked up a lovely commemorative coaster as reward for those efforts! I'm sure they will be taking pride of place on many an office desk.

Post race analysis is always fun, once I was actually able to breathe comfortably again, and I noted that some obviously got their heads down during the race, whether that was due to pure racing focus or just trying to avoid making eye contact with the locals I will leave you to decide for yourselves, but when I commented that the alarm went off at the school as I ran past Tim Shaw's response 'there was a school?', yes Tim you ran past it twice, I also seem to have been the only one that noted the washing machine we had to run around, twice.

Additionally it proved an opportune time for Rob Fairbanks to go on a recruitment drive for the club, so potentially we may have a new member joining us shortly, as long as we didn't scare him off that is! High probability we did considering who was there at the time though.

I have to make a special mention for Tim for his dedication to the race. Apparently he took a whole two days off from drinking this week to ensure he was in peak physical fitness for it - sterling effort Tim! Wednesday/Thursday might have been wiser than Monday/Tuesday though, just saying. 😉