13:25 minutes. That’s how long pro cyclist Tom Pidcock needed to cover a distance of 5 km, not cycling though, but running. He did a spontaneous attempt in February this year, but it seems like he might give it another try again soon, as Strava experts judged that Pidcock’s time can’t be right. Cycling magazine Rouleur asked the athlete about it.
With a time of 13:25 minute, Pidcock would have been just five seconds shy of the British record noted by Marc Scott in 2020. For a cyclist, who tries a 5K run for the first time, that wouldn’t be realistic, data analysts realized. According to them, the pace calculations are inconsistent, the GPS lines are off and the date and time stamp isn’t right either.
Rouleur asked Pidcock how he feels about it. “I was on Wahoo and switched to Ineos Grenadiers and Garmin. I got my Garmin watch out and charged it, and it was the wrong date and all that stuff. Apparently, the GPS was a bit out, but I thought of this perfect place to do the run. If I do three laps, it’s five km. And I started a little bit downhill, like Kipchoge did in his marathon. I measured it, did it, and it said five km on the watch”, Pidcock explains.
That people still question his fast time, Pidcock understands: “Apparently, it’s not five km. The line is a little bit… not so accurate. I don’t know, maybe it’s a little bit wrong.”
Pidcock will probably give it another go somewhere in the beginning of next year, after the World Championship cyclocross. He hopes to run a time under fifteen minutes then. “I don’t want to get over fifteen minutes. It’s pointless, isn’t it? The idea was to run a sub-15 minute 5K at the end of cross season”, he comments on the Rouleur.
