Christmas parkrun

I was still feeling a bit rough on Christmas Eve, so I resisted the temptation to go out and settled for a couple of glasses of vin rouge before retiring.  I still wasn’t 100% on Christmas Day as the dreaded ‘second day hangover’ took control of my body but of course this wouldn’t stop me completing another parkrun.  I was surprise that over 100 other runners appeared at Pollok Park for the morning 5k, including speed merchants Luke Traynor and Jethro Lennox as well as Ayr’s Toni McIntosh making her return to running after a lengthy period out injured.

My VLM training schedule had me down to run 3miles, so a wee 5k would do fine and enable me to tick off day 25 of the Marcothon. 

The Finish  ...Pic by Chris Cue

I was feeling a lot better than the day before but didn’t want to overdo it, as I knew I was racing at Ayr the next day.  I thought about taking it easy and running at 5min/k pace but then thought that it would be good if I could take a couple of seconds off of yesterday’s time of 23:20.  I ran along chatting with Angela Campbell for the first mile, before she dropped off the pace a little.  I was surprised to see that Martin Myant wasn’t far in front as I made my way round the course at a constant pace.  Angela kept me in her sights and as I crossed the line in 34^th place, with a time of 23:18, I was pleased to see that she finished immediately behind me in 23:19.  Job done as far as I was concerned but Angela was upset, as she thought that she had worked hard and had hoped to take more than 4 seconds off of her time.  I did point out that the conditions were harder and in particular the strong wind would have slowed most runners.  It will be interesting to see if Run Britain confirms this or not.  Especially as Luke and Jethro didn’t seem to be too effected, crossing the line in an incredible 15:22 and 17:05 respectively.  Toni placed 40^th but her goal was just to make it around the course without any reoccurrence of her injury.

Post Race with Al, Toni and Jim

With the Burrell closed, many of the runners and volunteers had brought along hot drinks, cakes and chocolates to share.  It was just a bit of a shame that the cold wind didn’t make for amenable conditions for standing around chatting.

I had run my 90^th parkrun and my 65^th race of the year.

Results

Photos