The Ross Barkley Challenge - 22nd June - 5th July 2020

The Ross Barkley Challenge was born when the overpaid roundballer (Tautology?)  was outed on Twitter by the @stravaw*****r page for claiming a 16 minute 5km run when his "elapsed time" on Strava was over an hour due to having several rests and pausing his watch. Since then running clubs all over have been creating challenges based on this ‘feat’ Anyone whos been involved on a parkrun core team will be familiar with the difference between elapsed and moving time leading to numerous emails from disgruntled runners over a slower time than their strava claims - Top Tip: setting your run to the ‘race’ category on strava will show elapsed time only.

As if I wasn’t already the least popular club member it was time to further hit my popularity with our own version of the RB5k. Run 5k in one hour pausing your watch between intervals taking moving time only. The rest time should allow all runners to do a much faster 5km than a simple 5k run.

The good thing about this challenge is that it is a sneaky interval training session run how intervals should be. Most runners when training don’t run hard enough on the intervals and don’t run easy enough on the rest portions between intervals. You should run slow enough so that you can recover sufficiently to hit the next interval hard again. Try this on the next club interval training session (whenever that may be).

26 people submitted entries with 17 sub-20 minute efforts but really impressive times from everyone. Top 3 were in 3rd Michael Walker (14:47), 2nd was Damien Lote (14:02) and in 1st place breaking the existing 5km World record with 12:01 was Jack Pitcher.

Most entrants went for mainly downhill options although this is not without issues as peoples quadriceps generally aren’t accustomed to the load of running downhill fast. The effort of going back up hill is also a time sink, some runners found routes that allowed for a long steady downhill and short uphill.  Dave Cribb went for the strategy of not understanding the rules properly. 

A runner vote on the best/most creative strategy meant that Laura Gilbert’s ‘Wing-it strategy was the clear winner. No-one went for Kipchoge drafting strategies or long-suffering partners driving them back up the hill in between nut maybe next time

In the Selfie competition, there was a clear and obvious winner, Adrian Grimshaw put in a valiant effort but Steven Burge’s rubber mush could not be beaten as he submitted a series of gurns that wouldn’t look out of place on a Toby Jug.

In the lucky dip of all runners who submitted a time Googles Random number generator drew 7 which means that Ceri Sharples wins the last bottle

Fastest: Jack Pitcher

Cleverest: Laura Gilbert

Least photogenic: Steven Burge

Luckiest: Ceri Sharples

Let me know what type of wine (or beer/cider) you would like as I haven’t purchased the prizes yet as part of my normal level of organisation