Starting the year by going back to bed

After a slow start to 2025, can a new, arbitrary 5K goal get me going

There were lots of easy, non-running days over Christmas.

And so it’s 2025. How the years slip by, hey? Thinking just that over Christmas, I decided to look back at the one race distance I seem to have run fairly consistently over the years, the 5K.

Looking back, my earliest result as an adult was from 2010, when I was 36 years old and just getting back into running after a fairly long hiatus. I say, “as an adult”, because one evening in the summer of 1991, after a long day playing football with my friends in the park during the school holidays, I turned up for training at my running club and they had set up a 5K time trial. The run was done on a dirt track and I had never run further than 3,000m on the track before, so it was a new experience. I remember the laps seemingly going on forever, and definitely getting the pacing wrong, but I finished in 16:50, which became my PB for the distance.

I didn’t run another 5K for almost 20 years, and I’ve never run a faster one, which sort of puts that hazy memory in the ‘halcyon days of youth’ bracket: those days when I was so fit and athletic that I could just knock out a 16:50 5K after a day playing football, on a dirt track next to a supermarket on the wrong side of town. (Fade in the Bruce Springsteen music.)

Alas, enough of these rose-tinted spectacles … since getting back into running around 2010, and coming up with my plan to travel to Kenya to write my first book, I’ve been running 5Ks fairly regularly. For what it’s worth, here are my best times for each year since then (in the years with no time, I didn’t run a 5K):