Parkrun

Park run

On a cloudy but hot Saturday morning, I had the chance to attend my local Parkrun, which is a weekly organised 5 k run all over the world. For your local Park run and to register visit here: http://www.parkrun.org.uk the people are friendly and very encouraging.

I hadn’t been for a few months as it’s a 15 mile journey but I go as often as I can but I’m always glad I did.

Parkrun begins with a thank you to the volunteers, any notices and announcements. My first Parkrun last year was just after the Boston bombings and we had a minutes silence before we ran. After this we then headed to the start. My local Parkrun is 3 laps of a park but others have 1/2 loops so they’re all unique. I personally enjoy the 3 laps but it’s easy to lose count sometimes!

I went with the ambition of getting a PB (28.44) or at least under 30 minutes but missed both of these. Apparently I was being a little too ambitious having hardly run in the last 6 weeks & doing next to no speed work in this time. Initially I was disappointed but only for about 5 minutes when I reminded myself of this and added to that, it was a very warm morning.

My first lap I was feeling great, really pushing myself and keeping a good pace. I didn’t take my Garmin as I wanted to go by how I felt rather than looking at paces but my mile between 1.5 – 2.5 was around 9 minutes which is very speedy for me. After the 1.5 mile mark I started to flag and was annoyed that I had to walk for a few minutes so my next mile was more in the 11 minutes mark but dug deep and ran with a lovely fellow club runner who encouraged me to carry on and to push a bit harder to which I’m grateful as always.

Results are emailed and text to each runner very quickly after the end of the run. I received my text at 10.17am – within an hour of finishing which is a lovely touch. Details such as where you came overall, your age placing and others are emailed to each runner also.

This week I finished 114th out of 167 runners & came 3rd in my age/ genderbracket! I don’t want to spoil it and check how many other women are in the same bracket as me, ignorance is bliss and all that. I did have a quick look and I would need to knock 5 minutes off my time to be 1st so we’ll see how that goes ha.