I did this 5k before in November 2008 in 20 minutes 30 seconds.  I was disappointed with that time but it is what I did.

Today, I wanted sub-20 mins.  I have been training well for the last four months and so I felt I should have improved.

But I didn’t know who to run with and I didn’t want to run too fast to start with.  So I went reasonably quick but not all out.  There was a bloke who tried to overtake me about 0.5k in but I sped up a fraction.  Then he tried again about 1.8k so I asked him what time he normally runs.  He said twenty-and-a-half.  So I knew I had to beat him.  The first 2k were done in something like 7:50 but I felt I had a lot more in me.  So I pushed the pace up quite a bit until it started hurting.  The next 2k got me about a 100m lead over the guy I spoke to.  By this stage I had also caught up with someone who was 80m ahead of me at the half-way point.  I got to within 5m of someone else but kept thinking that I wanted to ease off the hurting.  I think I probably did in that I stopped gaining on the bloke in front and didn’t do a sprint for the line, so he beat me by about 10m.

By my watch, I think I finished in around 19:38.  The results aren’t up yet but as the organiser has probably only just got home!

That gives me a VDOT of 50.  It also predicts a half-marathon time of 1:31.

So, all in all, a good start to the day.