Carly smashes her PB and goes sub-22 at Yeovilton!

Wednesday evening, 14th August, saw the staging of the 5th and penultimate round of the Yeovilton Summer 5k series. The usual trio of suspects were on the start line for the Exmouth Harriers in the shapes of Jon Garrity and Adam and Carly Miller. For Carly, she was targeting this race as a serious attempt to post her first sub 22 minute clocking. As avid followers of this blog will know, this is a target that Carly's had in her sights for some time but, for various reasons, she has just fallen short of that target on several previous attempts, coming close on more than one occasion, but never quite nailing it. For this race she had secured the services of local running legend and super vet-60 athlete, Gordan Seaward, to run around with her and try and pace her and push her on to break that magical 22 minute barrier. Gordan does the time keeping at parkrun each week and he has been very helpful to Carly over the past year, providing her with a training plan and some race targets. One of those targets was a sub 48 minute 10k (which she's has comfortably achieved twice this year) and the other was a sub-22 5k. Could this be the night that she would nail it? YES!!!

As Carly never runs with a watch, she is never sure of what pace she is running at until she sees the clock at the finish. With Gordon there to take care of the mile splits and the pacing, that freed up Carly to give all her efforts to her running. Having a pacer does not make achieving a time goal any easier from a physical point of view, however, as it was Carly's legs and lungs that still had to do the hard work and produce the goods. Carly stuck to Gordon like glue and he delivered her into the final half mile ahead of target - all she had to do was dig deep and kick for the finish, which she did in style. She not only just broke 22 minutes, she sailed through in a superb 21:35. This was over half a minute quicker than her previous best for the distance, set at the Arrow Valley parkrun earlier this year, and a huge improvement of 4 minutes on her first attempt at the distance, set at the Great West Warm Up 5k in 2011. It gave her 70th place overall out of a healthy turn out of 167 finishers. Well done Carly - we all knew you could do it this year and are so pleased for you! Carly's response?: "I'm pleased, but it nearly killed me'!!!

On a night where calm conditions were conducive to fast times, Adam Miller and Jon Garrity also had fine runs. Unfortunately neither of them were able to follow Carly's lead and smash out a new PB but they both came tanatlisingly close to their best times. Adam was suffering slightly with a tight hamstring, which he reported hampered his speed slightly, even though he felt in really good shape and fitness otherwise. That said, he did well to finish 11th in a time of 16:47, which was only 8 seconds shy of his PB set here in the previous round.

Jon Garrity came even closer to his, posting a time of 17:52 which was just 1 second adrift of his PB, also set here last time. This performance gave Jon 28th place overall, which just highlights the quality of the field at this event, and 5th MV40 in a competitive category on this occasion.

Well done to all 3 runners. We wish them well for the final round of the series which takes place on September 11th, 7:15pm.

Jon Garrity: well positioned in a pack of runners at the Yeovilton 5k