Back at the Drogo

I find myself racing ghosts around Dartmoor again on this beautiful, but brutally hilly 10-mile race

Sometimes I ask myself: what is the point in racing? It’s a fair old rigmarole just getting there, getting back, and on top of that you have to pay for the privilege. You could so much more easily just go for a run by yourself, for free, in you own time, no stress. And yet, something in me loves a good race.

On Sunday I was back at the Drogo 10, a brutally hilly 10-mile race in a dramatic valley on Dartmoor. Last year I wrote about how I had managed to beat my 36-year-old self (finishing higher up the field than I did when I ran this race in 2010). I was delighted with that, even if I was still way off my 40-year-old self, who had blazed around the course in 2014 - the year in which I set every one of my personal best times, in the year after I’d been in Japan.

This year I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for, or aiming to do in the race. I was just there for the thrill of the chase, the rush you get when you hare off at the start and find yourself in a crowd of 600 runners hurtling down a steep valley as though your life depended on it.

Before the race I felt no nerves at all. Without any pre-defined goal to attain, the outcome didn’t seem to matter. Was this running maturity, finally? Enjoying the process, with no stress on the outcome? I sort of knew, deep down, that once we got going, I would give it everything, my competitive urges would kick in, I’d push myself to my edge. But I felt calm about that. It would just happen, I didn’t need to over-think it in advance. And so it proved.