Midweek: out with the cows on the Town Moor again

I'm getting slack at writing up these runs. I came back to the draft of this one a whole week after I first started it (though I've kept the original date) and all I found was "Blah. Cows." Plus a photo. Here's the photo:

So... cows. That means I headed back to the Town Moor, just a couple of days after I'd done the parkrun there. When I set off from work, I think the main plan was to head towards Exhibition Park, Wylam Brewery and the old boating lake. By the time I'd skirted the shoppers by heading up John Dobson St, I just wasn't really feeling the route up past the Robinson Library, so I headed up Claremont Road instead. There was the odd pause as I crossed roads, but I didn't think I'd been that slow. Google thought otherwise: over 11 minutes to do 2K by the time I'd hit the town moor. A 5:30/km pace. I'd been hoping to maintain a pace more like 5:10/km. 😦

From that point on, I wanted to make up for the slow start. I couldn't really figure how it had happened — while it had been uphill, it was very gentle — but I needed to push on. Much to my surprise when I got back, I found that after the second kilometre of 5:39 pace, my third kilometre scraped under 5:00/km pace. And the fourth was 4:50/km. By the time I'd finished the 5K distance, I'd rescued the run by getting under 26 minutes in total. That was very pleasing, even if the start was disappointing. Maybe next time I'd nail it the whole way round...?

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