Finished the Run Melbourne 5km in 30:57 - and made my 30-minutes-something goal!

I really enjoyed Run Melbourne course today, and the feel of the event was great. We couldn't have had a better winter morning to run... the sun was out in spurts, but not out the whole time we were running, which can get a little hot even in winter.

Oh... and did I mention I made the time I wanted to?? Okay, I met my revised goal for the 5km race. After last week's run of 31:27 on a very flat course I thought sub-30 may be a little ambitious and could cause me to make the classic rookie mistake (yes, I said rookie, running cat!) of going out too early and having to slow down dramatically... or worse, walk! So my revised goal was to run 30-minutes-something, which I just managed to do. And I didn't really know what the course would be, so with 1 horrible hill, 1 decent hill and 1 reasonable hill at the end plus a headwind in places, I'm pretty pleased with 30:57 and my placing of 1,267 in a field of I'm-not-too-sure-yet.

Here was today's course:

We'll find out more when the results are posted online and in The Age on Tuesday. I'm hoping they have the same info they had for the Mother's Day Classic - giving you your placing in the event overall, but also comparing you to others in the same age bracket. We also ran over a mat at about the 2km mark, so it will be interesting to see the split time.

Everything about the event was so well organised by Start to Finish - the training groups were fantastic, they sent everybody off in waves properly, and there were bands playing along the course too. A couple of things to nitpick at (like, don't put school children that are just going to stop and walk after 3 minutes in front of us!), but overall I had a really fun day.

Bring on the Melbourne Marathon training (or should I say The Coffee Club 10km) on Wednesday!