Rob's Running Blog

A Flying 5k with a Perplexing Time of 27:15

Wanted to do a quick 5k to blow the rust off the legs, and wanted to do the first couple of k as a warmup then go all out for a few k. Didn’t quite go according to that plan – ran the first km in 5:44 which wasn’t bad for a warmup pace, and then did the second k in 5:19 and then really started to put some strides in – except the quicker I went the slower the Garmin seemed to register for a while – I sped up to a very fast pace and the Garmin said I was doing something ridiculous like 7 minutes per km, and it was only when I slowed that it went under 5 mins per KM, I think something went wrong on that KM because I felt I was going faster having warmed up, but that km clocked over in 5:27 (I suspect it was longer than 5k though). In any case I slowed down for a maintenace penultimate km, and then again, in the last k, I wast putting in some huge bursts of speed and the display went under 4 mins per km as i powered into what felt like my fastest pace in a long, long time, I felt the Garmin was slowing down, I seemed to cover two road junctions and it barely moved, and then I finished the last km in 5:16, so at least on this occasion my last km was the fastest, as it should be, am just not sure where the two slower kms came from as I felt I was going fast all the way – so will just put it down to the vagaries of the Garmin (I would upgrade my 105 if I could afford to!), as I felt this run was a lot faster all round than the similarly timed one of last week.

In all, although I am only managing one fast run and a long run per week at the moment, due to time constraints, I feel I am slowly improving, and if I can manage today’s pace for 10k it would mean a sub 55 10k, which now seems a reasonable target for the City of Manchester 10k in a few weeks 🙂