Serpiesphere Virtual 5K – Week 2 (18th to 24th April 2020)

Hello Serpies,

We had a successful inaugural week of the Serpiesphere Virtual 5k. A massive thank you and hope you all enjoyed it. This is a quick review of last week and details of this week’s race.

We are absolutely delighted that over the past week, 116 Serpies took part, that is more than the capacity of our monthly handicap race! Together we covered a distance of 580km – roughly from Seymour Centre to the England-Scotland border. We also had 5k performances from far and wide – south of France, Budapest, the Netherlands, Ireland, and many more that I am not aware of (feel free to email me from where you run!). So much for a “lockdown”. Well done to you all, let's do it again this week!

Last week’s Virtual Podium

The scratch week might only be for calculating handicap times, but it didn’t stop some of our best runners laying down the marker. Last week’s winners are:

Female:

  1. Tash Sheel – finish time 18:51
  2. Marta Bagnati – 19:15
  3. Sarah Pemberton – 19:39

Male:

  1. Chris Wright – 16:53
  2. Hugh Torry – 16:55
  3. George Suthon – 16:56

(In a real race this would have been a photo finish…)

Age graded performance:

  1. Andrew Roberts – finish time 20:06; age graded percentage 84.3%
  2. James Hartop – 17:21; 81.9%
  3. Hugh Torry – 16:55; 81.6%

Well done everyone!

 

This week – the Handicap Race

  • Just like last week, please submit your time before 23:59 on Friday 24th April via this link: https://www.serpentine.org.uk/rdb/showvirtual5k.php?race=13482. Click “Self add result”, then you may have to scroll to find “Serpiesphere Virtual 5K” and choose “18 Apr 2020” (which includes all performances from 18th to 24th April).
  • From this week onwards we are introducing a simple way for race verification. After some considerations, we believe this is the simplest way of verifying distances for both competitors and organisers. This will involve the following:
    • Please take a photo or screenshot that shows your time and distance, this can be a screenshot of your Strava / Garmin result page, or a picture of your watch showing a time and distance. Anything that shows your time and distance would be fine.
    • Submit the photo or screenshot at this Dropbox link (also before 23:59 on Friday): https://www.dropbox.com/request/DAXAB7cOY3l0rrJEKbKn. You do not need an account for Dropbox; instead this will just ask for your name (so we can correlate your performance with the time submitted) and email address (so you’ll get a confirmation of upload).

As long as the distance is a minimum of 3.11 miles or 5.00km and it shows a finish time, it will be accepted.

Apologies to those who have already submitted your times for this week – I’d appreciate it if you could send us a screenshot / photo as well.

Don't worry if you did not run last week, submit your time this week to become a scratch runner - you may win next week!

Last but by no means the least, please do not forget the social distancing rules that are applied to this race - rules are listed here.

 

Serpiesphere Virtual Café – Saturday 25th April

Next Saturday we will once again be at the Virtual Café on Saturday morning to chat, to catch up, and to announce the next Virtual Podium. As we now have a handicapped race, faster runners will have a bigger time handicap than slower runners, that means anybody can win and be on the Virtual Podium – the key is to make a big enough improvement from last week! Zoom meeting details will be shared later this week.

 

Finally thanks to my co-organisers Sarah Maisey, Nic Barberis and Pete Mackintosh. Any queries or suggestions to the race (as this is still a new race), please contact me or one of us.

 

Happy running,

Hans Ho

Participation Representative (participation@serpentine.org.uk)

Submitted: 19 April 2020

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