The Ross 5K was a race I’d been anxiously anticipating for weeks. After setting a challenging goal in my last post, I was determined to see if I could push my limits. With each training session, I felt my fitness improving, but there was always the lingering doubt of whether I could actually achieve my target time. On race day, I lined up at the starting line with a mix of excitement and nerves. When the gun sounded, I took off, determined to have a solid crack. And in the end, I not only met my goal but shattered my previous personal best.

🔜 Pre-Race Antics

In the days leading up to the event I was quite nervous. There is something about a short fast 5k that scares the living daylights out of me. The impending suffering frightens me. I was surprised to wake up on race day feeling calm and collected. Maybe all of my earlier worrying and negative visualisation had finally cleared my head of anxiety.

I was the most specifically prepared for a 5k that I have ever been. There wasn’t much to be scared of. Even the painful feelings of running fast had been practiced. I had started feeling comfortable with being uncomfortable. Race day began with black coffee and chocolate crepes. Things went to plan and I managed a toilet visit before I was picked up by Oli and Tab and we drove to pick up Lily and head to Ross.

I kept and eye on the clock while we drove. When the time was right I started gagging on my bicarb mix (21g). I mixed it in juice rather than straight water in the hope of improving the taste. Rather than improving the taste I just ruined a perfectly good bottle of juice. Shortly after drinking my mix I began to feel nauseous. Then it was time to drink my pycnogenol. Usually I like the taste but it was hard to drink with intense nausea. I wondered if it was car sickness but I think the bicarb was the culprit.

Feeling like I could vomit I was annoyed that I might have ruined my race by messing around with stupid experiments. I closed my eyes and it wasn’t long till we arrived at Ross and I could get out of the car. The nausea settled but my stomach had began it’s rumblings. After grabbing my race bib I went to find a vacant toilet. This is where my worries truly began. A torrent of liquid erupted from me and for the second time that day I thought my race was ruined. I now had the very real fear of shitting myself mid race.

After finishing in the toilet I prepared for a warm up. I went for another precautionary toilet visit and the torrent seemed to have abated now. My warmup began with the 10k runners. It allowed me get warm and also familiarise myself with the main turns of the course.

⌛ Pre Race Timeline

• 5:50 – 🌅 wake up
• 6:15 – ☕ black coffee and 4 x chocolate crepes
  • 🚽 first toilet visit
• 6:50 – 🚗 Oli and Tab arrive and pick me up
• 7:30 – 🧪 started to drink bicarb, gradually finished the whole thing with a banana to wash it down
• 7:45 – 🤢 feeling extremely nauseous in the car, worried I have ruined the race, drank pycnogenol
• 8:15 – 📍 arrive at Ross, still feeling kind of nauseous
• 8:35 – 🚽 Ross toilet visit, liquid coming out, got worried about it
• 8:50 – 🚽 second Ross toilet visit, not much left, must have cleared out the pipes
• 9:00 – 🌡️ started warming up with the 10k runners
  • 💨 Strides to warm up, running around amongst some of the 10k runners
  • 😅 Broke a decent sweat and got some speed in my legs
  • 🏃‍♂️ Nearly ran 5km in the warm up, probably around 20 minute warm up
• 9:20 – 🚽 final toilet visit to be sure, pipes clear. Feeling better and more confident after surviving the warm up run
• 9:30 – 🚀 race start

🏁 Race Recap

I went straight to the front from the start and didn’t look back. Feeling amazing the fast pace felt surpisingly comfortable. My greatest challenge was dodging all of the 10km runners. I was trying to take the inside lines on corners to maintain speed but with runners everywhere in front I had to take whatever gaps were available. The first km went by at a super fast pace (3:13). I allowed the pace to moderate on the second km (3:22).

My plan was to settle in to something that felt sustainable in the middling kilometres. The blustery wind and the dodging of runners definitely slowed me more than I planned. The course loops back around to near the start line before a final out and back towards the highway.

At the intersection of the loop and the out and back there was running traffic carnage. The people running the loop needed to cross the paths of the runners coming back towards the finish line. I weave my way through and got some words of encouragement from Oli as I went past. He told me to ‘lock in’ and it helped. The route now took me across the historic bridge and out towards the highway. Passing through into the 3rd kilometre I focused and things were starting to get painful.

I repeated my mantra telling myself to ‘lock in’ for the final push. My next goal was the turn around point. There was a stiff headwind on this section which added another level of difficulty to contend with. I focused on pushing and staying consistent despite the wind. At the turn around point I did a wide U-turn trying to maintain as much momentum as I could and accelerated back towards town.

There were hoards of 10km runners to contend with. For the first time all race I wondered where my opponents were. I finally saw the second place runner coming back the other way and realised that I had the win pretty much guaranteed. This was a relief but I kind of wish I had some competitors running up with me to get a bit more out of myself.

Running back across the bridge I could see the finishing arch. It felt like it was approaching sooner than expected. With the end in sight I accelerated building up towards my finishing kick. My breathing was becoming laboured and my pace felt unsustainably fast. I was so much faster than the runners I was overtaking. It required a high degree of concentration to find a path between them in my state of extreme exertion.

Passing through the ridiculous intersection I dodged more runners. Oli was there cheering me on again. By this stage my breathing was so loud. I was huffing like a steam engine about to bust a boiler. After all of my interval training, I started to love the feeling of a hard finish. My finish felt amazing! I was shocked when I looked down at my watch to see the time then disappointed to see this distance was 140m short.

If you want to see a video of my finishing kick there is a few on the Strava activity below.

📊 Results

I finished with a convincing win and a new personal best. I was incredibly stoked with my performance. But the course was only 4.86km. Usually, if I am a few metres short I would keep running so it ticked over. But I wasn’t going to run an extra 140m, especially after using all my energy getting to the finish. I set a new course record by 1 second, but there’s no way it should count when I did a shorter course.

The distance discrepancy was from the turn around point being in the wrong position. Looking at last years Strava activities the u-turn location was further down the road. I was disappointed to not have an official PB.

I still wanted to know what my 5k time would be so I did my own calculation. Using the average pace of 3:16 min/km, this converts to 5.1 m/s. It would take 27.44 seconds to run the remaining 140m at this pace. My extrapolated finish time is 16:21. This is a conservative approach, I suspect I had a bit more finishing kick left in me and could have held my final km pace which would have given me a time of 16:19.

My pacing wasn’t perfect but I achieved my overall goal of horseshoe splits. The course had far more undulations than I anticipated. Undulations paired with the blustery wind made holding a consistent pace difficult. Overall I am happy with the pacing because at the end of the day I achieved the time goal and that’s what matters the most.

🎯 Goal Scorecard

📈 Performance Goals	Compliance
Main goal: 16:30 finish time	✅ 16:21 calculated finish time
Stretch goal: 16:00 finish time	❌ achieved it but wasn’t a full 5k so not counting it
Pacing goals: Horse shoe pacing Sustainable with kick	✅ decent horse shoe splits ✅ finishing split fastest of the race

🔄 Process Goals	Compliance
Get to start line feeling confident	✅ was confident in my abilities
Run hard but smart	✅ managed effort well
Don’t give up during the race, hang on for dear life	✅ held onto the pace despite the wind
Finish feeling like I left it all out there	🟠 (feel like I could have pushed a bit harder)

📈 Fast 5k Progress

I successfully made progress in the Fast 5k Project! I took 27 seconds off my previous best time and proved to myself that there is still room for improvement. When I embarked on this project I had concerns that it may not be possible and was unrealistic. The ultimate goal of 15 minutes may still be a long way out of reach but I feel like I still have lots of potential improvements to make.

I can now happily put another data point on the 5k PB graph. It is trending in the right direction!

💭 Reflections

In hindsight I shouldn’t have taken as much bicarb as I did before the run. I had been testing up to 19g in training then on race day I jumped it up to 21g. In my test runs I often hadn’t finished the whole bicarb drink either, there was usually some powder left in the bottom. On the day I finished my batch completely and the small extra amount is probably what caused my GI issues. Thankfully the GI issues didn’t adversely affect my race performance. I think the bicarb probably did help give me a boost albeit a small one.

At the end of the day things went about as good as I could have possibly wanted. I achieved my time goal, had a good run and felt good. My one thought is that I could have pushed harder. It is one of those ‘what if?’ scenarios that there is no way of testing. If I had have pushed harder I may have blown up and limped home.

The Ross 5K was a transformative experience. Despite a relatively short 12-week training block, I managed to shave 27 seconds off my personal best. While the training wasn’t perfect, key sessions helped me dial in my 5k pace. Not only has this race fuelled my desire to chase a faster 5k time, but it has also reignited my love for trail running. The brief hiatus from trails made me appreciate them even more and has inspired me to explore new trails and push my limits further. I believe there’s still significant room for improvement, and I’m excited to see what I can achieve with continued dedication and training.