Guy Fawkes 5 2025

I recently ran the Guy Fawkes 5 for the second time. Organised by Tewkesbury Running Club, the Guy Fawkes 5 is a five mile race through the countryside on the outskirts of Tewkesbury. It is also the final race of the year on the Gloucestershire AAA race series. As it happens, I actually didn’t need to run it for the series, as it was my ninth race and I’d already secured my age category win at my eighth race – Sharpness 4. But I still wanted to run it!

It was a cool., dry, sunny morning. You couldn’t ask for better conditions for a race in November. There were loads of members of our club running it, despite the fact it’s not on our club’s road race series. Although it seems some of them believed it was! Meanwhile, my husband, sister and brother-in-law were running the inaugural Cirencester half marathon – my husband’s third consecutive week of running a half marathon, after Weston Super Half and Stroud half marathon.

Race HQ for Guy Fawkes 5 was the sports hall at Tewkesbury School. Organisers had tried to encourage runners to park at Dobbies or the Cotswolds Designer Outlet rather than the school. This would have involved a slightly longer walk and also crossing the road on a rather tricky motorway roundabout. I knew there was lots of parking at the school, so I ignored the advice. I think everyone else did too!

The registration queues seemed to be badly organised. There were four queues, sorted by surname. There was an A-D with nobody waiting. The middle two queues also had nobody waiting. Then there was my queue – Q-Z, with an absolutely massive queue! Timing chips were ankle straps, like we’d just been released from prison on licence.

The bag drop was inside the hall and was secure and well organised. There were four portable toilets just outside the school, with quite a big queue. We should have been able to use the toilets inside too, but apparently they were flooded.

I left the hall for some quiet to sort my headphones out (bone conductors were allowed for the race). I couldn’t get them to work and couldn’t see very well as I’d put my glasses in my bag in the bag drop. I asked a lady from the club if she could help me and she struggled too, even though she could see, so I had to run without music. That was a shame as I have a 5 mile playlist which is full of music perfect for running fast.

The start line is about a kilometre from the school, so I used that as a warm-up jog and did some of the warm-up drills we do at the running club.

The start line is on a narrow country lane. There were 424 runners, plus volunteers and spectators crowded in there. And we kept having to move out of the way for cars driving in!

I lined up at the start with three of the faster ladies from our club. The race started at exactly 10am. Organisers describe the course as a ‘frying pan’. It goes out on a straight road for a few hundred metres, then turns to the right. There is then a big loop, which rejoins the frying pan handle just before the end.

My five mile PB, at Linda Franks Race in January this year, is 35:36 – so just over a seven minute/ mile. I’d hoped to run something similar at Guy Fawkes 5, but my husband felt that was a bit ambitious. I’ve done so many races lately that I haven’t been able to go to the speed training at the club. So I thought I would aim for something between 7 min/ mile and 7:15 min/ mile. Predictably, I set off way too fast.

We’d been warned that the road gets very uneven between about 0.4 and 0.9 miles, and they weren’t wrong! I had to try to stay in the middle of the road, as uneven roads and Nike Vaporflys don’t work well together and I felt very unbalanced. After the uneven road, we ran along a footpath through a housing estate. This had three small road crossings in it, but there was no traffic.

It wasn’t long before I got overtaken by the lady who had initially been my main competition in the Gloucestershire race series. We’d raced against each other three times and I’d beaten her twice. She was at the top of the table for our age category, but then hadn’t done the last few races in the series, so had slipped to third. She got a long way ahead and I wasn’t going to catch her!

After the housing estate, we were back on a country road. Then there was a left turn onto what felt more like a main road, but was still very quiet. Three friends from our club were there on their bikes to support, which was nice.

The course is pretty much flat, with the biggest climbs being onto the bridges over the M5. We crossed the M5 at around 2.5 miles and again at around four miles. I passed four miles in 29 minutes – the time it had taken me to run Sharpness 4, so I was happy with that.

The whole route was country roads. I don’t think we saw a vehicle. With the exception of our friends from the club, there were no supporters apart from at the very start/ end. There were marshals around the course where we needed to turn, but it was generally a quiet run! After the first mile, I was just running on my own.

It was a relief to see Tewkesbury Abbey and the houses in the distance and to know we were getting close to the finish. The ‘pan handle’ finishing straight predictably felt longer on the way back than it had on the way out. I tried to increase my pace a bit as I passed the ‘200 metres to go’ sign.

I crossed the finish line in 36:23 – six seconds faster than at Guy Fawkes 5 last year! I was 127th out of 424 runners. I was second in my age category, compared to third last year. The winner finished in 25:26 and first lady finished in 29:13.

There was a bottle of water and an apple or banana on the finish line. There were medals and free cake back at the sports hall, as well as printouts with your time etc on them.

I’ve run a race every single weekend from August bank holiday (Pershore Plum 10k) to Guy Fawkes 5 on 2nd November. Racing every weekend impacts my midweek running and my distances have been right down. It will be good to get back to more regular running again. I have three more races left this year – all short and no more consecutive weekends.