Back to racing news now. I ran the Oxford Town and Gown 10k race last Sunday, and don’t believe I’ve even reported back on the 5k I ran back in April. Shameful.
Okay - the 5k, my first ever, was a great event. I caught an early Saturday train to Basingstoke, which didn’t quite seem like your dream start. However, Basingstoke is where the nearest Park Run event is held every Saturday. Basically you just turn up in the Park for 9am, and run round the park three times with about 100 others, for free! Your time is recorded, and there’s a trip to the coffee shop afterwards if you’ve time to chat. It’s such a fantastic idea, and everyone is a volunteer. The race itself was strange for me - so much shorter than anything I’ve done before, but nice and low-profile, so no pressure. There are a lot of people there who’ve really just started running, so it’s not an ultra competitive environment. Having said that, the record time is 16 minutes, which is quite bl**dy fast enough. I was confident of a sub 19 minute time, based on last year’s racing, but it had been a long while since my last competitive race (October’s Snowdon marathon really). Still, I managed 18:51, which seems a good starting point. I met up with a few people I’d met or heard of through Fetch, the running web site, and the whole occasion was really welcoming for newcomers. Highly recommended.
Last Sunday I ran in the Oxford 10k in a mixture of absolutely stonking rain and windy sunshine (not sure if sunshine can be windy . . . that’s a physics problem). I was hoping to crack last year’s PB (personal best) time of 39:18 (chip time, 39:36 gun time) and 104th position. This equates to about 6:21 per mile, or 3:56 per km, and I’d had a couple of training runs up to 4 miles at this pace or below which felt hard but tolerable.
The result: 39:16 (gun time) or 39:08 (chip time) and 70th position. Chip time is more accurately measured from the starting line to the finish, as it can take some seconds to cross the start line after the gun goes. However, I’m recording the gun time because I’m being mean to myself! In a big, congested race, unless you’re elite and start at the front, you’d always record your chip time. There are some photos of the day, which at least show how wet it was on the Oxford Mail web site.
So - onwards and upwards. As humanity pointlessly drives onward and upward, so do I. The new plan for 2009, which will disappoint fans of ultra long distance, or marathoners, is to concentrate on the 10k. My 24 week plan targets the November Brighton 10k for a record performance, somewhere in the region of 38 minutes, hopefully 37 minutes something. The longer term plan is to take that new speed into marathon training for 2010 and get that sub 3 hour time that we all, quite obviously, dreamt about as small children (except for Haile Gebre Selassie who dreamt about sub 2 hours).