Fulfords Five

Sunday 1st February saw the Westgates at our first Fulfords Five mile road race at Exmouth. The course does 2 loops through the town with legs along the seafront. Weather was bitingly cold with a nasty east wind, but general opinion was that last year’s conditions were worse with stronger winds sand-blasting the competitors! So with comparatively good conditions I elected to wear shorts, but thank God I wasn’t running further than five miles!

Not much to say about this race really; facilities and organisation ticked all the right boxes and there was plenty of plod about to control the traffic. Not being too fit I aimed for 35 minutes or under so my 34:26was OK. Very pleased and relieved that my age-graded percentage time was just a point or two above Lesley’s! Looking at the provisional results it seems that SWRR did a clean sweep of the major prizes. First man finished at 5:05min/mile pace, which at about 84% is quite high class. Us lesser mortals plodded round, but it was enjoyable, and it’s always good to try a different event.

Some words from Lesley: I was going to moan about how cold it was, but given what we’ve had today, we were really lucky again. I still wore my woolly hat, along with the usual coat, gloves and wrist-warmers. The only concession to it being a race was to wear knee-length shorts instead of leggings.And I was still cold at the finish, in 40:33, which was age-graded at 69%.