Training - Week 5
Saturday - PARKRUN - RACE DAY!
Today was parkrun day - anyone reading this thread will have probably twigged by now that I was looking forward to this somewhat!! I have been feeling really good and felt like I was in shape to do a good time...
This was actually my first ever parkrun - I was never even aware of their existence before coming onto this forum. The most local parkrun to me, about 20-25 mins drive in the car, is a fairly new one and this week was only the 15th event held there.
As a bit of background, my 5k PB of 22:22 was set probably three or four years ago and was run on a track. I have recently run 23:07 and even more recently 23:03 but I don't think I have been under 23 minutes for a good year or even eighteen months. So today was my chance to dip back into the 22s and maybe get close to that PB... hopefully!
Sam gave me some advice and a few acceleration strides to do on my warm up, to make sure I was ready to go straight away and that my legs were up to speed straight away.
Unfortunately, as this was the first time I had ever run the event, I was a little worried about missing hearing what I needed to do, especially after we were told that there would be a pre-race briefing. I hung around waiting for this at the expense of doing a proper warm-up and wasted probably ten minutes that I could have spent much more efficiently!
It was also, it must be said, bloomin' freezing! There is snow forecast this weekend around my neck of the woods and it certainly felt cold enough for that this morning... Coupled with that, the parkrun is literally as close to the coast as it is possible to be and part of the course is along the path that runs next to the sea wall, meaning there was a strong, really biting wind blowing in from the sea... The course consisted of three laps so we had to negotiate this wind-tunnel three times!
The course was actually pretty well laid out, pacing-wise - each lap was almost bang on one mile and then there was a little extra bit on the last lap to make up the extra few yards.
Anyway, despite the almost total lack of warm up, we got going and I actually felt surprsingly good. I had been advised by other runners that have done lots of parkruns to go out fairly quickly to avoid bottle-necking and getting stuck behind people going a lot slower than your goal pace so I went out pretty quick and did some neat side-steps and a bit of emergency dodging to sneak my way through the inital scrum at the start. According to the Garmin, I was running at around 6mins 30secs per mile for the first few hundred metres.
As soon as we'd strung out a little, I quickly got into a nice pace and ignored anyone steaming off in front of me - I've always been very careful of going off too fast too soon and try to avoid latching on to the back of someone and following them... I figure it's much better just to run my own race and not worry about what anyone else is doing! Having said that, there weren't that many people flying off into the distance so I was quite pleased!
I had been really in two minds as to how to approach the pacing - I wanted to run close to, or beat, my PB but I was worried aobut going out too quick and crashing and burning. I settled last night on running at 7m 30s per mile, which would equate to around 22m 40s, and then see what I had left in the last half mile or so to save a few seconds...
But this morning I woke up and thought "what the hell" and decided instead to go and run it at 7m 20s and see if I could hang on at the end!
I felt surprisingly good running at this pace for the first lap and kept speeding up from it! I knew this was only the first mile so I deliberately tried to be at least a little sensible and finished the first mile in 7m 14s...
Edited: 12/01/2013 at 15:50
