Katrina and I were down in Liverpool and Wrexham for the weekend to celebrate my sister’s 60th birthday so we decided to run the Princes parkrun on Saturday morning.  We have only ever run parkrun at Pollok Park so we were looking forward to trying a different one.

We parked in Sefton Park just after 8.30am which gave us time to run over to Princes Park and do a recce of the lap. The course is two and a half laps of the park.

The route was quite varied with some up hill, down hill and on different width of paths and different types of surface.

There were about 200 running so I started fairly near the front as the path did narrow after half a mile or so. I was interested to see whether I could faster than 19:54 that I ran a couple of weeks ago at Pollok. I could feel my quads from Thursday’s Ben Lomond Run.

I like to run these 5k’s without looking at my watch at all as basically I’m trying to run as hard as I can for as long as I can!

I went past a few runners early on and then settled into my position. I counted about 20 runners ahead as we turned left at the Obelisk. For the remainder of the race I over took a few more runners and was overtaken by a few near the end.

Looking at my splits afterwards I ran the first mile in 5:58, the second in 6:23 and the third in 6:23.

I felt as though I was slowing a bit on third mile so I was happy to see that I did keep it going to the end. I finished 19th in 19:28 so I was 28 seconds faster than Pollok.

I like the fact that parkrun also give you a age graded % and if you sort by that column I came 2nd!!

Katrina also enjoyed her run. She is still struggling a bit with her sore knee but it seems to be getting a bit better slowly.