Run race 14:01 [4] 3.83 km (3:40 / km)
My season best by some margin, but frustrating to fall just short of my main target, thanks mainly to a stitch with 500 metres to go - I hit the 3.5km marker in 12.54 and would normally expect to do 1.04 or 1.05 from there, but it didn't quite happen.
I didn't expect it to be anywhere near as fast - I felt very ordinary on the warm-up and equally ordinary at the start, so I was quite surprised to look at my watch at 500m and see that I was 3 seconds under last time instead of 3 seconds over. Continued to feel not so brilliant on the hill but kept the pace going more or less OK until the final stages. There are still roadworks across the top which means running on the (muddy in places) inside track - the splits suggest that might have been worth a couple of seconds (important in this context).
A few were obviously doing intervals rather than racing - in the second half, each time I thought I'd got in a nice bunch they stopped after a couple of hundred metres.
This is the last regular round of the season - there's a 'final' in two weeks (nominally the '12 under 12', but these days they struggle to find 12 people who've done under 13) but I won't qualify for that. (Bruce, who ran his third successive 12.58 or 12.59, will). I'll be back in August or September; by then sub-14 will hopefully be routine. Still, on a day when I felt bad I'm back within 20-25 seconds of a par time from last year, which gives me some optimism that I'll be back there in 6-8 weeks - just in time for WMOC.
Km splits: 3.36, 3.50, 3.40, 3.38.