Beijing 2008

It was a lovely day today, with a beautiful clear sky and low winter sunshine. Just the day for scampering 5k round Bushy Park, you might be thinking. And you'd be right. I am pleased to report that I knocked a tasty two minutes off my previous time.

I have calculated that, at this rate of improvement, I will have beaten the world record by the end of April. By mid summer, I would hope to be completing the race before I even start.

This should put me in excellent shape to challenge for medal contention at the Beijing olympics. Paula Radcliffe eat your heart out.

The Bushy Park time trial is quite a remarkable thing. It's a free event (free! scores very highly on the Entertainment & EconomyTM scale), and happens every week. You run 5k round the park, and they calculate your time and then publish it (plus the grim red-faced pictures, as previously mentioned) on their website. But the really remarkable things are:

1. Hundreds of people turn up each week. This week it was 280-odd. Last week it was peeing down with rain and there were still around 200 people. Don't forget, this is 9am on a Saturday. Most sane people are just falling out of bed and reaching for the kettle.
2. Everybody who runs it is really FAST. And I mean FAST. The best time for the course is 14 minutes dead. The world record for 5km is only around 13 minutes. There are regularly three or four runners each week coming in at under 17 minutes. My friend Mick (a pretty handy runner) came in at a fairly smart 21 minutes, and was 71st. Seventy-first!!!

Of course, the major disadvantage of the run being full of hundreds of very fast people is that it tends to inspire feelings of inadequacy in us lesser mortals. Particularly because from any given point on the route you can see most of the rest of the field stretched out ahead of you, in all their toned, bouncing, fresh-faced, lycra-clad glory.

I'm not publishing this week's picture. Partly because I'm using a different PC which doesn't allow me to post pictures. But mostly because I look like a huge running bosom on little stick legs. I'm thinking surgery.