Although I was feeling terrible, I decided to get my 125th parkrun in the bag and made my way along to Pollok Park for my 106th time running the Glasgow 5k event. To be honest, I felt sick during my warm up and thought about giving it a miss, instead I convinced myself that a 'non starter' was just the same as a 'did not finish' but pulling out a wee bit earlier. I also took strength from the fact that there are a lot of parkrunners who would be behind me, even in an off day.
With the National Cross Country races attracting a lot of the club runners, the front of the field was probably not as strong as usual. I took up position behind a couple of charity runners as we set off at 9:30am. I ran a fairly steady race in the first half, ignoring my Garmin and using runners in front of me to help pull me around the undulating coarse. A few puddles, some muddy parts and quite a lot of leaves had to be negotiated, so a cautious approach was probably the right choice. I managed to pick it up a little in the second half. I hadn't set myself any targets, apart from getting around without being sick, so I was neither happy nor disappointed to place 98th with a time of 23:52.
A word of praise for the organisers and volunteers at the event who have tackled the long queues which used to greet many of the finishers further down the line Today there was hardly any waiting at all as the team of barcode scanners performed their duties admirably.
I squeezed in a mile warm down before joining some running buddies for coffee and chat in the Burrell Café, including Gerry and Sarah who had recently completed the TUI Marathon Palma de Mallorca and were taking a well earned rest.
A quick look at my fetch training log revealed that this had actually been my fastest time at Pollok Park since New Year's day. Another positive :-)
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