Race date: Wednesday, 8 May 2019

The Chase the Sun series of events challenge runners to get round the course before the sun sets. There are options of 5k or 10k. This particular one took place at the London Olympic Park, and featured a sole Strider, Dave Beech. Here is Dave’s brief report:

Faced with the prospect of an evening alone holed up in a London hotel prior to an all day meeting the following day I was planning on doing an evening run. Then I noticed a 10km race was to take place only 3 stops on the tube from my hotel – what could be more tempting in such circumstances?

And so it was that on an unreasonably cool and wet evening in May I found myself lined up with 500 other runners ready to compete in the “Chase the Sun 10km”, four laps (2 laps of you only wanted to do 5km) around the legacy Olympic Park in Stratford, East London.

It turned out to be a very well organised event – one of a series organised by the RunThrough company – with flapjacks and bananas (and the obligatory medal) for all finishers. At the start/finish/lap area was a live gospel choir singing without music – a welcome change from the usual pumped up, beat driven, drivel that seems to be de rigueur at most modern races nowadays.

Having just come back from an injury my aim was simply to finish injury free, so a time of 48 minutes 13 seconds, 96th and 3rd in v60 age category was a more than satisfactory outcome.

Striders result: