Race Report: The Great Gower Run

Fall is time for my run focus, where the swimming happens sporadically and I cycle one a week just for pleasure. It's nice to just enjoy biking rather than suffering through intervals, and it's a beautiful time of year to be out riding.

The cooler temperatures also make it super nice for running, and I've been ramping up my volume quite a bit. A month in and it was time to tackle one of my long-term goals: the sub-20 minute 5K. As luck would have it there was a race happening about 15 minutes away in North Gower - though perhaps unluckily it was the week we moved into a new house. Regardless, I was feeling good about my chances of joining the sub-20 club.

The Great Gower Run is not a big race (136 in the 5K), just a nice small community fundraiser on a nice crisp fall day. The course was relatively flat (36m of elevation gain) with closed roads, so lots of room to move. My plan was to hold around 4:00/km splits and ramp it up over the last kilometre. Garmin has my splits as: 3:50/4:04/4:02/4:03/3:44. It was definitely an uncomfortable pace but I held it pretty well and crossed the finish line with an official time of 19:49 and a pleasantly surprising 2nd place overall.

It was very gratifying to reach that goal time - it's something I've wanted to achieve for a while, and making it happen probably felt better than any race result I've had thusfar. I'm going to target a 10K in either late October or early November before I get back into serious swimming and biking. I have a long term goal of the sub-40 minute 10K, but I don't think that's realistic this year. The Runner's World Race Time Predictor says I can do 41:19, while McMillan says 41:09, so I'll likely aim to break 41 minutes this year.