Pollok parkrun race report

Thankfully Pollok parkrun was on today. I arrived about 9.10am so had time for a bit of a warm up. Neal arrived just after me but as he wasn’t feeling too well and had planned to take it easy he didn’t join me. Caroline was running but ran 12miles from their flat to get there.

Half way round my warm up I realised I was going to cut it close to arrive back in time for the 9.30am start! Thankfully a guy from Sweatshop was telling the runners about their Christmas sale so I was okay!

I set off about 4-5 rows back and settled into a steady pace. I was hoping to run under 21mins but as I haven’t done a parkrun since Christmas Day last year wasn’t too sure how it would go.

For the first mile or so I went past quite a few runners then settled into my position. I was feeling quite strong and felt I kept my pace pretty steady. My pace graph agrees with that.

My heart rate graph shows that I had a steady run …

I finished 22nd in 20mins 17secs.

I just about squeezed onto the first page of the results! 231 people ran.

One of the things I like about the parkrun results is that they also give you an age graded percentage which is an advantage when you are 55 yrs old! So if you sort the results by age graded % I came 9th !!

For my cool down I ran back cheering runners as they finished and then ran in with Neal, Caroline and their 6yr old friend Zak who ran the whole 5k. Impressive.

So that’s race 1 of 3 done. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s run which is Giffnock North’s 4.8 mile handicap race with a difference. For this one you have to guess your time for the 4.8 miles and the closest to their guess wins. You are not allowed to run with a watch!

I think I’ll go for an average pace of 7:25 which would give me a time of 35mins 36secs. I would go for a faster time but we have our own Handicap race on Monday night which is flat out so I want to save my self a bit for that one!