A proper job over 5K

After all those years of running ultra marathons, I now can’t stop running 5Ks. It’s a quick hit, a cheap thrill, perhaps, but why not? I love the burn up of a 5K, the elbows out, the fight-every-step energy, the full-throttle running, the lack of palaver, the streamlined simplicity of it. Bam, go hard, hold on, it’s done, buzzing mate.

Although I’d finally achieved my Breaking-18 target of a sub-18 minute 5K at the Torbay parkrun back in February, the purist in me also wanted to do it in a real race, with an officially measured course. I know it’s splitting hairs, but let’s keep the project alive. I was having too much fun to stop.

So on Tuesday, I hopped in the car and drove up to Exeter for the first of the summer Run Exe 5K series. I ran this race a year ago, also hoping to go sub 18, and ended up running 18:19. That was off the back of an 18:00 parkrun. This time I was coming in off the back of a 17:46 parkrun. Doing the maths, that meant … I don’t know, what did it mean?

I bumped into an old sparring partner at the start, Angus. He’d beaten me at the recent Bideford Half Marathon and said he was hoping to run under 18 minutes. He asked me what time I was going for.

Well, also under 18 minutes, I said. But then, I had run 17:46 a few weeks earlier. Surely my goal should be to beat that? Was it really harder in a real race?

The race laid on pacemakers, and they had one running at 17:30 pace, and the next one at 18:30. My plan, I decided, was to follow the 17:30 pacer and just tuck in. Hang on. Switch off.

Good luck, said Angus. He wasn’t going to risk setting off that fast, he said, but would sit back and see how he felt.