Hyde Park Harriers Summer Mile Leeds – 26th June 2024

by Brad Wight

I entered this event in Leeds as I was away overnight with work. I’d raced the night before at a small scale one mile race in Lincoln and I’d mistakenly thought this would also be another race with a couple of dozen runners max but I was very wrong. On arriving at the park I realized it was quite a bit bigger than that! Club tents, coffee and food vans, the big inflatable finish line, digital timing board, music banging out, and 350 other runners gathered round.

The race was split in to 14 graded heats, two laps of the park totalling one mile. The slowest heat went first with runners in the 12-15 minute bracket, and got progressively faster as the evening went on. The fastest heat saw a great sprint finish between two local runners who both crossed the line in 4:29. All runners got a medal for taking part, with gold and silver medals awarded for fast times. For the men this was sub 5:00 for a gold and sub 5:30 for silver. The ladies had an additional 45 seconds to play with.

I was in heat 11 of 14. There was 25 of us in the starting pen and we were informed that we’d all put down 5:30 – 5:37 as our predicted time. I looked around at all the wiry racing snakes, some of them 25 years younger than me and felt some major imposter syndrome. However, when the race set off the pace was comfortable. I passed halfway in 2:45 and knew I had to speed up a bit if I wanted a silver medal. Coming around the final sharp bend I had about 400m to go, it was slightly uphill all the way but I felt good so I ramped up a long sprint finish and passed a load of runners to finish 6th in the heat and claimed a silver medal with a time of 5:27.2.

It was a cracking event, with big crowds of runners all supporting each other. I enjoyed it so much I’ll keep an eye out for it next year even if I’m not away with work.

Brad