The Erewash 5K Race

Today's Erewash 5km race was held at West Park in Long Eaton. It was due to start at 9.30am. the emails i received said you could register from 8.10am and to get there early. I arrived at 8.10 and i was the first competitor on site, they weren't quite ready and in my true enigmatic style i moaned at them "I'm here its ten past eight, the emails said be here early to register from ten past eight, this is not good enough. Get on with it!"

first one here

No one took me seriously though and quite right too. It actually turned out to be an advantage in more ways than one, as i was able to talk about my challenge to the organisers and the photographer. I had some shots taken and the lovely people from Jog Derbyshire took some details. Thank you to all the people i met this morning, both for your time and enthusiasm.

"Any runners going to do it in under 22 minutes, please take your place on the start" 10 people moved forward. "Anyone feel they can do it in under 25 minutes?... you're next" i turned to the person next to me. "Now do i go up, because i have run in under 25...?" she suggested i should go for it. I agreed.

safety brief

9.27 and i realised i hadn't set the watch, if I'm not careful it won't have got a satellite signal by the time the race starts. i quickly pressed go and and watched the screens time bar tick up...... Beep! just in time! We set off quick, i checked my pace at the first corner and i was way too fast, running at nearly 4 minutes per Km. I'm used to running between 5 and 5.30 minutes per Km. Ive got to slow down or I'm going be burnt out way to early. by the first km i was dead on my legs to quite honest, i was finding it hard to breath correctly and my legs felt like feathers blowing about in the wind! i did my best to pace myself to around 5 minutes and forget about my legs, think about something else while my legs run. As i got to the 3 km point i felt somewhat better, i had the chance to chat to few people as i ran past them. they all said the same thing, they all went off too quick. There was a guy i knew taking part in the run and i knew he was going to be completing in under 22 minutes. I spoke to him before the race and he told me he didn't really want to be there and was only doing it because his wife had registered him along with herself. He said he wanted to get it over with and get home. I think he was the reason we all set off too fast, he set a blistering pace from the start just because he wanted to be at home watching Saturday kitchen or something!

I crossed the line in 46th place with a time of 24.17 (chip time) i was extremely pleased with that. Close behind me was Sally Hull, an old school friend, she was over the moon with coming in 48th in under 25 minutes and thanked me for being her unofficial pacer. we all received a medal for competing too. 

Sally Hull and I at the finish

I uploaded my run data from my watch to endomondo when i got back. It was then that i noticed that i had recorded a shorter distance than the advertised 5km at only 4.88km. What? I'm supposed to be completing 5k a day! True to my word i popped out straight away and added an extra half a km run to the days total. It turns out that if a course is particularly bendy a GPS device might chop corners off, so i will have physically covered the distance it just didn't show correctly. 

Here is the link to the results

All in all, a good mornings run, a nice event run by nice people. The moral of this story is, don't follow the bloke who would rather be watching James Martin!

Below is a few photos from the official photographer, as competitors we are able to download the files for free.