Get out of the way, fast runner coming through!

After the success of my run at the St Patrick's Day Brueton parkrun, it was important to not get carried away and increase the mileage too soon. So instead I introduced some rowing and cycling into the week. I got the opportunity to run at Brueton again the following week, this time's incident involved an important pre-run matter meaning I didn't change into my trainers until 100 metres into the run! I stopped my watch whilst changing them and the final result was a very pleasing 27:21.

With the clocks going forward later in March, it meant that the mid-week post work 'Freedom parkrun' could be restarted and I've done three of those now already. At the end of the month I had another chance to run at parkrun whilst away in London to watch my fellow Chester Marathon runner Larry Chambers run at the Olympic Park Run (Note two words for Park Run with capital P and R). London is full of parkruns, with more opening all the time due to funding from Boris Johnson's office. I chose Mile End parkrun which was only in its 9th week and being on the tube line en route to the Olympic Stadium. Larry volunteered as photographer and Trish ended up self appointing herself as Event Director when the volunteers encountered problems with the stopwatch. The Mile End parkrun is in a small long and narrow park and has a unique feature in that the middle of the park is lifted up on a bridge over a road - you have to see it to believe it! It makes for a very undulating course, so this was a parkrun for hill training. 25th position out of 47 finishers and a time of 28:54 was a great result.

OK, so all this proved that I can do 5k distances pain free, albeit at times a few minutes off my best. Now to increase the mileage - my first training 10k followed at Easter, followed by a 10k race soon after - the fabulously named 'Wright Hassall Regency 10k' in Leamington Spa. This is a very popular and highly acclaimed race that actually incorporates the Leamington parkrun route (run in reverse direction). 2000 runners took part and with narrow paths for a large part of the first 5k, I got caught up with slower runners and held up by walkers in groups 2 or 3 abreast. I became concerned that I would be expending a lot of energy trying to get past people and indeed it felt at times that a lot of effort was required. I reached 5k at around 31:20, so not within my target of an hour for the whole run, but with the route moving from park path to road, the opportunity to up the pace was there to be taken. In order to still finish within the hour I would have to run the last 5k at a near to parkrun pace and with nothing to lose I decided to give it a go. All went fairly well, but at 5 miles it was looking a bit too tight, and a further increase in pace for a sixth mile at 9 minutes followed by a 7:20 minute pace sprint for the final 0.2 mile meant that I made it to the finish in 59:45 for a really, really good result. Super, smashing, great.