Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

After my half-marathon on November 12th, in which I had my best final time since 2015 by employing the Jeff Galloway strategy of inserting regular short intervals of walking over the course of the race, I decided to see how this would work on a shorter, 5K race.  Although in earlier years my final times of this distance had gotten down to 23-24 minutes, since 2019 for the span of my previous 26 Depot Parkruns here in Gainesville (a free weekly Saturday morning run/walk run by volunteers) I never ran faster than my 30:00 finish in that first Parkrun.  Until today, that is.  This time I ran the first 6 minutes, then speed-walked 40 seconds...then ran again until my timer hit 12 minutes, then speed-walked 40 more seconds, alternating like this until I crossed the finish line at 29:47, finally breaking that frustrating 30-minute barrier.  I already knew I could do it anyway because in another relatively recent local 5K race I had run it even faster, but this time it seemed more satisfying since it pointed the way to how I intend to run any future race, regardless of the distance.  The race time (7:30 am) temperature was 50 degrees with 93% humidity...lots of folks lined up bundled up: I dressed as usual, tee-shirt and shorts.  Running this Galloway method is more than getting faster finishing times...I actually feel that I could continue on for an indefinitely longer distance.  So now I'm wondering whether I really should set half-marathons as my longest race in the future.  You can view today's results by clicking HERE...