Parkrun #53: Whitley Bay, run 5

Another worst-yet time at a parkrun today, but this time, I was still pretty pleased overall.

27:10 might be a minute and a half slower than my best at Whitley Bay, but it looks like a good chunk of it was down to a pretty slow start. With low expectations beforehand, I opted to start near the back of the field — which at 550-odd people was bigger than usual here — and allowed myself to get boxed in too. That meant that I spent the first few minutes running with the pacers in the 33 and 34 minute bibs. Once past them, it was a matter of just keeping a pace that I felt I could manage and hoping that that meant I passed a few more pacer bibs in the process.

It felt slow going overall, but I did eventually crawl past those up to and including a guy in the 28 minute bib. After the poor start, that had been my baseline target; I didn't want another week of being slower than 28 minutes. Once I got beyond him, however, I realised I couldn't even see the 27-minute bib ahead of me (though I swear it had been in sight earlier). Instead, I just focused on those around me. While I felt I was keeping a constant pace, there were 2 or 3 people around me that I kept passing and then being passed by. We continued to swap positions all the way from about the 3km mark to the finish, where I was cheered to the line by John from work again; cheers, John! 😅

Looking back at my kilometre splits, it seems I was less consistent that I thought. But the thing that strikes me most is that after the slow first kilometre, each of my splits was actually a pretty decent pace, considering my current lack of match fitness. A 5:14, then 5:01, 5:23 and finally a 5:03 (plus another 150m at 4:44/km pace). That's about a 5:08/km average for the bulk of the run, which is very pleasing.

Unfortunately, this may well be the last parkrun I do for the next month. But really, it's not exactly unfortunate, as the reason I'll be skipping them is that I'll be away on holiday. Can't really complain at that. 🙂