How do you deal with a disappointing race?

So, this weekend, I was greatly looking forward to Brighton 10k.  Running in such an iconic seaside town, a huge field, cheering crowds, a really great event. I was properly ready.

Well, I blew it.

Or, rather, something with only hesitant medical information blew it for me.  I give you the dreaded side stitch.

Now before anyone calls me a big wimp, let me first say that I did run through it.  I always say a good runner should be able to run through a stitch, and run through it I did.  But by then it was too late.

So, it was all going brilliantly.  Take a look at this:

As you can see, the race was going like a textbook.  The first half of my race was perfect.  I ran exactly to plan, with my splits metronomic, ready to turn on the thrusters in mile 4 (which I did), and ready to give it the full afterburn in mile 5 and 6.  Which I started to.

Towards the end of my 5th mile, the stitch hit.  If you haven't had one while racing, it basically makes good running form impossible.  It slowed me by ten to fifteen seconds for that mile, and then went away.  "I'm okay", I thought.  And I was, until about a quarter way through mile 6.  Then it hit me again.  You know the ones.  The type of side stitch that feels like someone's doing an incision with a medieval halberd.  It slowed me to marathon pace for about 3 minutes before going away.  I lost about 40 seconds and 7 places during that 3 minutes.

It went away with about half a mile to go.  I attempted a strong finish and succeeded, finishing at sub 5k pace, and in an attempt to claw back those precious places, succeeded in outsprinting someone on the line.  But by then the damage had been done.  I finished almost a minute over the times I had been achieving in training, and felt gutted.  But extra gutted because the thing which had ruined my race was utterly outside of my control.  Sure, it's only 10k, but it was my first BIIIIIG race, my first expo visit, etc.  It was a big deal for me.

I have looked.  And NOWHERE on the web is an approved diagnosis of the reasons or cause of a stitch.  Apparently it happens 'just because'.

Now, every athlete gets a bad race from time to time.  The defining thing is how the athlete chooses to recover from the setback.  It was after I thought about this that I made a decision.  Simply blurting it out online would be inappropriate, attention-seeking and ineffective.  Sure, I've been sad at home, that's only natural, but I thought I would take a photo of my medal and t-shirt as a thank you to the hundreds of volunteers, crowd members and well-wishers who said good luck to me.  The people who show an interest always deserve a mention.  Thank you.  And my lovely family, who had a bath ready when I got home, cheese toasties to cheer me up, and a lovely home-drawn message-this also deserved a photo.

The best compliment

Thank you!

Writing a blog is a good way for me to recover from a disappointment too. The important thing is to learn the lesson from whatever went wrong.  Although my race issue was a random act of 'something', there's always a way to learn from it. And the learning from today was that it's not all about me.

So once again, big thanks to everyone who shows an interest, asks about our races even though they're not really interested, says good luck, cheers us on, carries our bags, roars us over the line, runs our baths, helps us celebrate, and helps us recover.

Us runners ain't nothing without our supporters!