Glasgow parkrun 64, 13 March 2010

Following my confidence booster at Haweswater I was up for a good race at my 37th Glasgow parkrun. However I hadn’t slept well and during my warm up my legs felt heavy. Before the race I chatted with Kirkintilloch’s Marie McChord and Willie Reid, both good athletes and both better runners than me, although I have on the very rare occasion managed to beat them. Marie had recorded a time of 21:16 on her last outing four weeks ago and has a course PB of 21:12; Willie Reid has a course PB of 20:17 but neither of them are 100% at the moment, so I thought that I could maybe add a very rare occasion by beating them both.

After another lengthy pre-race diatribe from the race organiser, to be fair their were a lot of announcements to be made but I think that these get emailed to most runners anyway, we were off heading down the road. I was running behind Marie and as we turned left at the bottom, marshals on both the right and left shouted encouragement to me. As we headed out towards the ‘woodpecker’ Marie raise her right hand, indicating that she was moving right and weaved her way ahead of me. I decided that, if I was going to give the race a go, I should stick close to her and made my way through the pack. We climbed the first we hill and as we approached the glade my Garmin bleeped indicating 1k. Marie’s pace had slowed slightly and as I was feeling good I decided to overtake her, Willie Reid must have been behind us and sharing that thought, as I saw him speed past the both of us. I gave chase and using my long legs to full advantage managed to overtake him before we turned left and headed for the hills. With the Balloch to Clydebank Half being held on Sunday and the other reasons their didn’t seem to be as many weel kent faces around me as usual. I dug in deep and was confident that as I made my way through the field that I had left Willie and Marie behind.

I was tiring a bit and as I ran down the glade for the second time, Willie overtook me on my right hand side but it wasn’t to be for long as I increased my pace once again on the downward section. Sharp left and as I made it up the hills I could feel myself slowing and was overtaken a couple of times on the last hill. By the time I had reached the final downhill section there was no-one immediately in front of me but I still ran my fastest to try to take as many seconds off of my time as possible.

(Marie and Willie in white at the half way point. Pic by Gil Williamson)


I crossed the line in 56th place and stopped my Garmin to reveal a time of 21:23, just five seconds out of my PB. The next finisher (Andrew Griffiths) shook my hand and congratulated me, I didn’t recognise him and hadn’t seen him during the race. I did recognise his Garscube Harrier vest though and the broad grin on his face which came from taken 10 seconds off of his course PB to finish in 21:26. Willie Reid was 58th in 21:29 and Marie McChord placed 63rd in 21:35.

Susan Addison did great to get a new PB and place second woman in 20:17, Marie’s other half Tom also got a new PB finishing in 20:14 as did Tom Keenan with 23:19.  Congratulations to each of them.


My detailed Garmin results supported my gut feeling that I had slowed as the race had progressed. I guess that my legs were still a bit tired from my exertions at Haweswater and although I was happy to get another 70+% wava, I now appreciate that I’ll need to work harder throughout the race to achieve a new PB.