Midweek: a 4K "sprint"

After the 10K a couple of days ago, I got back to a much shorter lunchtime run today. As is often the case, I had limited time, so I opted to stay close to the office. I also wanted it to be fairly flat to allow me to practice a faster pace, but rather than heading down to the quayside, this time I decided to do laps of the Tyne Bridge and High Level Bridge... which, it turns out, is almost exactly 2km per lap.

Leaving the office by the back door, I headed straight over Mosely Street and past Cale Cross House onto the Tyne Bridge. By the time I reached the turning point on the Gateshead side, Google Fit piped up with its 1K progress report... and shocked me. At the time, it said "4 minutes and 34 seconds" though it's since revised that downwards!

Anyway, that set the tone for the rest of the run, with me seeing how well I could maintain such a ridiculous pace. I rarely come out of the blocks that fast, so I wanted to capitalise on it.

Pushing hard, my second kilometre was reported around the 4:45 mark. Frustratingly, however, I actually had to walk a bit due to pedestrians combined with roadworks blocking my path. As soon as I was past, I kicked on and finally got back to the Gateshead side of the bridges with another split calculated as being under the magic 5:00/km pace. This was insane.

I kept pushing, though it was definitely getting harder. Coming over the High Level, I even resorted to some unaccustomed assertiveness, asking to get past any blocking pedestrians before I reached them. I knew this was the last lap I had the time for, but sadly I didn't hear the 4K being announced over the traffic noise and ended up running right past the office on Grey Street to be sure I'd completed it. Turns out I had done the final kilometre under the 5:00 mark. In fact, overall, I'd done 4km in a total of 18:39. 😲

Had I been able to continue just 1km further at that pace, I'd have been looking at a 5K time of around 23:30. When a colleague pointed this out to me, I'll admit I was a bit gutted I hadn't just continued and ignored my 1pm meeting. 😂 

Of course, it was on the flat (largely) and I didn't have any parkrun congestion to deal with, but if I can replicate that kind of performance at a parkrun sometime soon, I could well be looking at a PB. 🤞