This past week has been ‘half-term’ for most of the local schools. Kirsty - one of our good (running) friends is a teacher so as she had the week off work chose to head into London’s Hyde Park on Friday to run the Last Friday Of The Month 5k race that is organised by Serpentine Running Club.

I happened to be working out of our company offices on Friday which are also in central London (right by Oxford Circus) so decided to bring my running gear into work and jog down to the start to give Kirsty some friendly support.

Once I arrived (it took about 10 minutes to get there) we chatted to one of the few people we knew there (John Hanscomb, one of only 24 people who have run every single London Marathon) and he told me that there would be no problem with me just turning up and running the race (as I had not pre-entered), but at the finish just steer well clear of the official finishing line area.

Well, that was it then - I was going to have a go at it! There are two starts to the race, one for the faster runners (those who expect to finish in under 21 minutes) and the second start. I ran in the first ‘wave’ of runners.

I had a good solid run. It was not easy and was a little undulating in places. Although its a great fast surface, there’s a few sharp turns which don’t really help things. Conditions were described on the website as ‘Mild, still, dry but wet underfoot.’

At the end of the race the time on my watch was 18:50, which I was very pleased with. Looking at the results this would have put me at 38th place (out of 195). Kirsty had a great run too, and finished in 22:38 - only a few seconds outside of her personal best 5k time.

After we’d both finished I then slowly ran back to the office, got myself cleaned up and then carried on working. Now, after running a good time on Friday, what impact would that have on the Richmond Park Time Trial less than 24 hours later…