The Rescheduled Atkins 3k on the Green - my first 3k race!

There was a feeling of déjà vu as I finally got to run my first ever 3k race today, the rescheduled Atkins 3k on the Green. After running it as a time trial last week, the initial excitement and anticipation had somewhat faded but I was still looking forward to it as I made my way along the river cycle path from my work at Atlantic Quay to Glasgow Green. I had worn my Scottish Vets vest last week but chose my Kilmarnock Harriers one today. There were a lot more runners this week, including many familiar faces, including Al Maclachlan, Clare Barr, Tom Keenan, John Gilhooly and Graeme Aitken. After paying my £2 entry fee, I pinned No.14 on to my vest and lined up under the arch way with the other runners.

Clare Barr

At 12:30 we set off down to our right and headed east with the wind behind us. It didn’t take long for the ‘elites’ to forge a significant gap in front of the rest of us. John Gilhooly passed me and I made a half hearted attempt to stay with him before letting him go. I know that he’s faster than me, so my tactic was to keep him in my sights and let him pull me around the course. By the time we got to the turn, there were two other runners between John and myself and I continued my task of trying to close the gap on him as we headed west ward into the wind. A watching Brian O’donnell shouted encouragement to me and I had a quick glance to see who was behind me. I saw Tom and Graeme and others. However there was no Claire Barr to be seen, I figured that she must be right behind me and decided that as well as closing the gap on John, I would also try to keep her at bay. I’m sure that I was closing the gap slightly and had one of the other two in my sights, Cammy Ferguson.  I pushed in as much as I could in the final strait but he was just too far in front and crossed the line three seconds ahead of me. I finished in 18th place out of 34, with a time of just under 11:49 and was followed two seconds later by Claire, who won the women's race a with a huge PB, for the second time in the three race series (Erica Christie winning the other one). 

As we recovered and congratulated each other Claire queried her time, telling me that the organiser had shouted 12:02 as she passed the line. The error was the same twelve second error as last week and we and others pointed this out to the organisers, who accepted the error but couldn’t explain it. 

Claire kindly shared some of her goodies from her prize with me, the ones she didn't want of course,  before we all left the Green.  I used my jog back to work as my warm down.

The results were emailed to runners shortly after the event and revealed that Craig Cassidy, who ran the recent Dublin Marathon in 2:46:14, had a winning time of 9.44, which incidentally was Andrew Joyce’s winning time in the first race of the series.  Andrew settled for the runners up slot with a time of 9:53, whilst Russell Whittington placed third in 9:60.

My splits: 3:53; 4:05; 3:51 (My target is to run all three as sub 4min kilometres).