On the Thursday morning me Nick and Kenyan Ben walked from our village to the athletics stadium in Kericho, It was about 10am and 28degrees me and Nick both described the feeling as walking to our own funeral, It made it even more feel like that because some random guy started walking with us preaching about god and he kept mentioning the blood of Jesus, I personally was hoping for him to get run over (not killed though). The session was as tough as I expected it to be 4x800m off 2min 4x600m off 90sec 4x400m off 1 min, the session turned out as I expected me and Nick being in loads of pain and Ben looking like it was nothing, Ben wanted 1 of us to pace a lap for each rep and Nick loving pain was more than happy to do it, by the time we came to the 400's Nick was struggling so i decided to pace the 1st 400 for Ben, I ended up sprinting off like a dick and going through 100 at about 14 seconds and blew up at 150 and ended up running a 65, this pretty much ruined all of my other 300's and made them very slow. After the session we headed back to the village both me and Nick wasn't feeling to good and later on that evening Nick started to get a cold or possibly malaria.
Friday for me was a easy day because I was racing on the Saturday so I just did 40mins easy in the morning and headed to the tea hotel to watch a documentary on Michael caine, this was the only thing they was showing. The race started at around 11.30am at kericho college I think we arrived at about 9.30 so we could watch all of the other races, the course was 6x2km laps around some playing fields. Before the race had started my stomach was in pain and I was struggling to run properly but i was hoping that I would just run it off, me Matt Pierson Nick and Richard all towed the line waiting for the gun to go off, as soon as it went the Kenyans started sprinting and we all found ourselves in last place, unfortunately I pulled out of the race after 6minutes because my stomach was in agony and It felt like I was ready to poo myself, Matt had a good run coming 18th place Richard was 26th about 4mins behind Matt and Nick came last, watching Nick was quite painful it sort of looked like he was walking but at least he managed to finish the race even when Matt lapped him, the good thing with Nick is that the next race he will probably win! the race was won by a Kenyan steeplechase Olympic champion (not sure who). After the race my stomach was still giving me problems and even found walking very painful, Me and Nick both decided we needed a night out to take our minds of today bad performances so decided to take Kenneth and Simon (both Kenyans) down to the pub for a wild night out, we only ended up having 4 pints but we all felt on top of the world like nothing could stop us, I felt like I could run a sub 4mile like Ronald baniston. When we got back to our village Nick and I lied on top of the roof to watch the stars just like Will Smith and Tommy lee Jones in Men in black. Sunday was rest day for both of us and still my stomach was pretty bad, me Nick and Matt headed to the tea hotel and ended up watching some wrestling, this pretty much sums the day up. I ended up having Monday off too because my stomach was still bad and I felt sick, Tuesday was not much better but I decided to go for a easy 30min run with Nick in the evening, as we ran past the 1st village all of the kids started running alongside us and kept up with us for pretty much all of the run. Lucky for them they stopped at 27minutes because as soon as I finished I started throwing up for about 5minutes, I felt pretty good after I had threw up it sort of felt like I had made it in the world and that I could become a runner again.
JT
