Over recent weeks England has had a few outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease, and the current outbreak is closer to home. Although outside of the “Protection Zone” (unfortunately Windsor Great Park is not, which caused the cancellation of this years Windsor Half Marathon - due to be held in a few weeks time), Bushy Park is part of the “Surveillance Zone” which although means that we’re able to still run the Bushy Park Time Trial on a Saturday - we’re hoping the situation doesn’t force us to stop running. Of course, the situation with farmers up and down the country is just a touch more important than 400-odd crazy runners getting up early on a Saturday….anyway, back to business…

This morning the weather was beautiful for running, there were deer-a-plenty roaming around in the park and I was raring to go for a good time. I’ve been thinking about running hard for a good few days and thankfully conditions were ideal. Anyway, to cut a long story short I had a cracking race - I spent most of it running neck and neck with Sean P. (a fellow club runner) and Mark G. I didn’t look at my watch once during the race and ran hard throughout. In the final straight Sean edged ahead and I managed to creep in front of Mark and also get past a couple of other runners who were ahead of me.

As I neared the finishing line I could hear a few cheers from the helpers and supporters and as I crossed the line I found out I’d knocked my old personal best time at BPTT out of the ballpark by almost 30 seconds - today’s time was 18:05 (16th out of 438 finishers). Awesome.

OK, over 5k my personal best prior to this was 18:15 (from the Belgrave 5 road race) but on the Bushy Park course it was 18:33. Either way I’ve got another PB and that’s all that matters. The best thing about this is that I know I could have pushed harder so going sub-18 minutes is on the cards - just when I don’t yet know.

As for Sharon, she equaled her personal best time of 26:28. Superb.