5k: Done. Now What?

English: Battersea Power Station, London. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

OK, so you’ve done a 5k. Now what?

If it’s your first time then you may have done 5k in 21 minutes or 41 minutes or some other time.

1. Try and do it faster. Try and break that next minute barrier or 5 minute barrier. Doing 20 minutes appears to be some generally accepted badge of honour. Generally though you will come to a point probably between 25 minutes and 18 minutes where you plateau. Then what?

2. Go long. 10k, half marathon, marathon, ultra. I guess that’s the standard way forwards. Ultimately I don’t think a marathon is as much a badge of honour that it used to be as now very many have competed them.

3. Go crazy. You could do some unusual version of a 5k (or longer race) eg an off road race like GRIM Challenge. I think there used to be some sort of urban 5k at Battersea Power Station (although they may now have finished that) you could do a proper cross country (like the ones you hated at school)

4. Go national: You could try and ‘bag’ as many parkruns as possible in the UK. It’s something to do, I guess.

5. Go international: as 4. but more expensive and you may end up getting shot at in Camp Bastion.

6. Go varied: A lot of people try duathlon and/or triathlon. There are large duathlon events like the London Duathlon #LD14 on twitter; or going for a triathlon there are introductory ones involving a 400m swim that are more ‘doable’ for the novice swimmer.

7. Go carefully. whatever you do don’t get injured. Be sensible in your training.

8. Go friendly. Try to rope in friends and family to your new found hobby.

9. Go Often. Of course you can do more and head for a 50 or 100 parkrun T-shirt to prove, in the latter case, that you’ve run 500,000m around parks.

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