Chicked!

On the sometimes entertaining and sometimes rather worrying US Triathlon forum "Slowtwitch", to be "chicked" means to be beaten, preferably in a humiliating way, by a girl. I, and several hundred other runners, were chicked today at the weekly Bushy Park 5k Time Trial by a skinny little blonde girl who turned up, asked a lot of questions about the route and then ran a 16.25 - beaten only by one man. Turns out she was the 2008 Australian 10,000m national champion, so perhaps the humiliation is not so great. I was some 30 places behind, with an 18.56 - not great, but better than previous efforts this year.

My running is slowly getting there: I ran my first BPTT in July when the achilles started behaving itself, and my times have gone 19:33, 19:27, 19:18, 18:56. It's a big relief to dip under 19:00 again -at future events I will now allow myself to wear racing shoes rather than trainers because I won't worry about looking like a prat who has the pretentious shoes but not the speed. My PB at BPTT is 17:57 - not too bad because it's not a fast course; despite being dead flat the surface is poor. It'll be nice to be knocking on that door again.

Here I am pulling faces in the last few metres of today's race.