Road to Sub 25

For the past couple of weeks I have been the only one of the Road to Sub 20 trio that has been participating in parkruns.  Adrian has declined to take part, for reasons too complex to go into here, and Tommy has been laid up after sustaining a knee injury from his fall at Peckham.

To be honest, there's nothing particularly exciting about this...I've run a couple of decent PBs and it's allowed me to get closer to the competition.  But that is about all to report.

So last Saturday, attention moved to a less well publicised challenge.  Regular readers of this blog may have read between the lines and deciphered that Tommy, Adrian and I all have partners.  These are patient souls who put up with the three of us discussing tactics, statistics and any other nerdy items that take our fancy.

The WAGs (or, in truth FWAGs, ever since one of them became a fiance), also take part in parkruns to a greater or lesser extent, and over the New Year holiday discussed a little side challenge, dubbed with the working title of Road to Sub 25.  It won't surprise the reader to learn that the task is to run a parkrun in less than 25 minutes.

Despite the boys trying to encourage an element of competition to it, Road to Sub 25 is strictly a friendly affair...or so it seems to the the casual observer.  You see, I live with one of these ladies, and I have first hand experience of how competitive she is.  I also have my suspicions about the other two being just as keen to win.

And so, there was some excitement as I lined up alongside the FWAGs, at my local park run in Brockwell Park with Tommy and Adrian on the sidelines cheering us on.

As we usually see, competition drives strong performance, and in this instance it brought the best out of the ladies, with a combined total of 4 minutes and 29 seconds taken of their PBs.

The FWAGs post race

I'm pleased to say that my partner was the first of the three to cross the cross the line, in a time of 25.55, so at least one of us is performing well in our competition.

The questions is, will the Sub 25 challenge be achieved before the Road to Sub 20?  The answer: probably.