JPMorgan Corporate Chase Challenge 2011

Ever since I joined my current employer, Financial Risk Management, back in 2004 there's been one event on the company calendar that I've looked forward to even more than the Christmas Party (although there have been some great festive feasts too!) - the annual running of the JPMorgan Corporate Chase Challenge. If you haven't heard of this great 'little' event (which started in 1977) the gist is that the organisation arranges a whole series of races around the world where each race is exactly the same length - 5.6km. So everyone's times are directly comparable and the fastest finishers get to run in a championship race.

We're ready to go!

Sadly I'm not quite in that elite category - here you're talking about racing snakes getting around the 5.6km in 16 or 17 minutes (so in the ballpark of 15 minutes for 5K!). On the other hand I have consistently been the fastest FRM finisher and that ain't too bad! In the years that we've entered my results have come out like this:

2005: 21:00 (81/2641)
2006: 22:08 (218/6933)
2010: 20:45 (158/17678)
2011: 21:29 (325/19872)

Not to shabby really with me placing in the top 3% in the early years and even reaching the top 1% in recent times - although part of that placing just reflects how the series has mushroomed in popularity and now you have, literally, tens of thousands of entrants. Anyway this year I wasn't too sure how things would go given my erratic form so far this season and at the start line I had one simple goal - not to go out as fast as I did at the Regents Park 10K last week and blow up spectacularly. If I managed that then the race would be a success!

When the start gun went then a huge wave of runners charged past me as if they were fleeing from an angry rhino! Good luck I thought and stuck to my plan; sure enough after the first kilometre these middle-management heroes began easing up and I had plenty of traffic to weave through. Fortunately Battersea Park provides some fairly wide paths and the jams aren't too severe - and you do get a nice straight run alongside the river. After this though the course gets a bit wiggly to the extent that at about the 5K mark you run past the finish and onto a 600m loop around a field - very disheartening!

All the finishers - in 2010

Overall though I was very pleased with managing to hold a steady pace (3:44-3:45 min/km) all of the way round, with a strong second-half, even if I was beaten into second place by one of our contractors this year. Not too much of a surprise given that he's a sub-3 hour marathoner and currently running around 60-70 miles a week! I can live with that; the only question is whether I'll be able to re-kindle this form next year. I certainly hope so as the finishing T-shirts are real quality and great for training!

Distance: 8.0 miles

Time: 1h 02m 12s