Winter Handicap is Over

The winter handicap took place last night; finally! I don't think that any records were broken in terms of people present at one event OR that we've hit the ton in terms of total number of runners for the series.
A big vote of thanks to the Winter Handicap team(Keith, Anne and Martyn plus ???) who turn up each time to ensure that the rest of us can run.
Mick Quinn didn't show and I don't think that Martyn Booth did either but I could be wrong about the latter. This meant that it was between Steve S, Mark Law and myself to gain as many points as we could. I had no idea what sort of state I was in after the 10 miler on Sunday. It's a long time since I've raced twice in three days. Emma Wolff, Steve Sanders and moi were off at the same time. Emma wasn't sure if she'd actually get round, and within a few hundred yards she had to return to the leisure centre. Just Steve and Steve to climb to the windmills then. It seemed to be relatively easy, even though it's always a slog to the viewing point. I thought I was doing quite well until Steve S zoomed by and carried on with a fair bit of pace down the hill to Millhouse and the road crossing. Ah well, just keep going. However fast Steve ran wouldn't really matter to me, I just needed to run a reasonable time to keep fairly high up the points. Having an advantage of 14 points gave me a really good cushion for the night. More and more people went by; Steve Roebuck, Andy Swift, Damian Kilpin, Steve Stead, Joe Mann.... I thought that I was running out of steam and suddenly going backwards. Not sure if Mark Law had gone by as there were so many overtaking me at one point.
Here comes the line and a chance to look at the watch: 31:42? That would do nicely; fastest time for that way round and second fastest for the season: 31:30 being the best of the bunch.
I don't know what Steve's time was but it must have been fast. Hopefully not a minute or more otherwise it might move him out of contention for the winner on the night. It will be interesting to see if anyone did beat their best by one minute.
It's a shame that Steve S missed a race and Mick Q missed two. They were definitely better than myself in terms of age-graded times but I managed to turn up for every race. That's the first time I've been able to do that. Retirement does have the odd perk.