23:59!

Almost exactly a year after I managed to get my 5k time at a Parkrun under 25 minutes, I have managed to squeak in under 24 minutes at 23:59. I would have been even faster if I hadn't had to stop to retie my shoelaces (Go Me!). I was following a pacer for the first 3k, but lost him during the shoelace incident (shoelaces are one of the banes of my life!). The last 1.5k were pretty grim, to be honest, but I kept lecturing myself sternly about keeping the pace up and that obviously worked.

I was 91st overall, 12th female and 3rd woman between the ages of 45 and 49. I'm normally second in my age group. Having inspected the results I suspect some young whippersnapper has had birthday and moved up an age band.

Further inspection of the 11 women ahead of me reveals that 1 is under 10, 1 is 15-19, 6 are 20-24, 2 are 45-49, 1 is 50-54 (where are all the keen female runners between 25 and 44? That's a pretty strange age distribution). So if I were 5, 10, 15 or 20 years younger, I would be first in my age class (this is obviously deeply unfair at some level, especially since all of us in the 45-55 bracket are regulars and the other three are significantly faster than I am). Yes, I know it is a run not a race but, like ladyofastolat, I am easily motivated by the concept of levelling up, and moving up the rankings (as well as reducing my time) serves that purpose. Mind you, both of these measures are going to top out soon. It took me a year to drop my time from 30 minutes to 25 minutes for a 5k, and then another year to take another minute off that. It is likely to be slow going from here on, and time is not on my side, especially given the limits on how much time I'm prepared to devote to training.