Glasgow Athletics Association Miler Meeting, 5th June 2015

This Friday night meeting offered race opportunities at 800m and 3000m. I felt it came at a good point to see how training was going so put in a 3000m entry. With my race scheduled for 7.10pm sharp, this necessitated a 4.30pm departure from work (never a bad thing on a Friday I guess) to leave enough time to get home to East Kilbride from Paisley, change and eat and get back out the door to Hutchesons Grammar School. On the plus side, it got things out the way and I could support others/relax watching everyone else suffer.

 

The meeting had a remarkable response with 14(!) 800m and 4 3000m races scheduled to happen in the space of 2 and a quarter hours. It followed the same format of the BMC meetings I've attended in England with each race starting sharp at the advertised time, meaning if you're not there at said time, tough, you've missed it. The numbers attending meetings of this type clearly show there is an appetite for them. More of the same in the future hopefully.

 

Looking at the results as I write this, the 3000m A race was a very youthful one with me, at 31 years old, being the oldest competitor and also the only person over 30. 7 of the others were teenagers and the remaining 4 in their 20s.

 

I had a notional target of beating my personal best of 8:40 but conditions were breezy so I simply aimed to be competitive, run consistently and see where it took me. I quickly ended up at the back of the field. Disappointingly, I felt heavy legged, a rest the night before clearly not being enough recovery from the 44 miles I had run up til then that week. I told myself to stick with it and took closer order, gaining a couple of places in doing so. It was a good quality field and about a kilometre in, I had hung in there. I went through a mile in around 4:35-4:36 ish so not too shabby. The field stretched almost into single file, lead by Alistair Hay who had tracked pacemaker Mark Pollard. I found myself in a mini battle in the second half of the field with, amongst others, occasional training partner Craig Jardine from VP City of Glasgow and Edinburgh based Alex Carcas. The later stages became a blur of trading positions and the final reckoning brought me 9th place in a time of 8:43.27. With tired legs, post work fatigue and the windy weather, I was more than happy with this and saw it as a sign of good things to hopefully come. Pace wise, I seemed to have been pretty even, around 4:18 for the first 1500m and 4:25 for the second. Solid but not sharp was how I described it to Mike Johnston and my Dad who both concurred with this verdict.

 

Objective for the evening achieved, I took in some more races then had a short warm down jog to Hampden Park where my Dad (who drove ahead of me from the track) picked me up to go for my chip shop dinner. If I took anything from this, I'd say cautious optimism.

 

Results from all the night's races are here. The 3000m ones on their own, complete with evidence of my elderliness compared to my opposition, are here.