Machine-translated from Faroese and not yet reviewed. Read the original.
Last weekend Bjørk Herup Olsen set yet another Faroese record. A good week has passed since then, but athletics.fo is not going to let it be forgotten.
The race took place in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina. What made this race special was that no fewer than 48 women lined up at the start, ready for the 25 laps of the track. There must have been a tremendous amount of jostling and crowding, especially in the first few laps. Bjørk, who has been in very good form lately, had set herself the goal of getting down towards 36 minutes, which should by no means have been impossible.
The first half went very well indeed, and she covered it comfortably in about 18:10. But then she ran into problems with her calves. Before the race Bjørk had been unsure whether to run in spikes or ordinary racing shoes. She chose the spikes, which have no heel and therefore put much more strain on the calves and Achilles tendons. So her pace dropped a little in the second half, but Bjørk still crossed the line with a new Faroese record, which now stands at 36:58.27. Overall Bjørk finished 19th of the 48 runners. Right behind her in 20th place came Stefanie Fresenius, who shares a room with Bjørk, and who was in the Faroe Islands last summer and took part in the Ólavsøka Run, where she finished second.
Although Bjørk took more than 40 seconds off her own record from the Island Games on the Isle of Wight, where she won silver, there is little doubt that it is only a matter of time before she improves the record once again. Bearing in mind that she has run as fast as 36:18 in a 10 km road race, it should not be long before she also gets under 36 minutes.
10,000 m at the Island Games – Bjørk at the front on the last lap on her way to silver.
