2022 retrospective

I started this year doing no regular exercise at all — even the exercise bike bought in lockdown had become more of a drying rack than a workout machine.

I ended the year, however, having achieved all of the following:

  • Completed Couch to 5K (yay!)
  • Done an 8K urban orienteering event
  • Ran the Race for Life
  • Attended 15 16 parkruns at 12 different locations
  • Finished in the top 50% of men at multiple parkruns
  • Ran 5K in under 25 minutes (albeit on a treadmill)
I'm gonna say this was a pretty good year. 😁


Me, at Carlisle Park parkrun in Morpeth (November 2022)

So, what can I look forward to next year? A few options to consider:
  • Attend 30 parkruns over the course of the year?
  • Attend another 5 new parkrun locations? (Including Bramhall?)
  • Achieve a 25-minute time at a parkrun?
  • Achieve a sub-25-minute time at a parkrun?
  • Do a 10K event (the only 2022 goal I failed to achieve)?
  • Take Daughter the First on the 3K Race for Life?
Some of those definitely feel aspirational rather than realistic, but if 2022 has taught me anything, it's that I can achieve waaaay more than I think. So let's just go with it, yeah? 💪

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Midweek: Weetslade Colliery fantasy parkrun

Image
Indulge me for a moment. There was a time, back in my early-to-mid 20s, that I spent a very large chunk of my spare time on the computer, playing and making mods (and modding tools) for the Geoff Crammond Grand Prix games. While I had practically  zero social life (at least, in meatspace), I still look back on that time fondly as the most intensely creative period of my life. Turns out I even made car livery textures. Pleased with the rear wing of the Viz car! 😂 The thing I most enjoyed doing was imagining and creating 'fantasy' tracks. That is, purely imaginary circuits that you could then race. Which brings me onto this post and run. In recent weeks, I've been playing around with the idea of "If I could create my own parkrun course, where would I do it?" . Firing up onthegomap.com , finding local parks, and mapping out a 5K course has given me a feeling a bit like making F1 tracks back in the day. And tonight was my first run on one of the courses I've pu
Read more

Parkrun #25: Chopwell Wood

Image
Tell me... can you feel the milestone? Ohhhh yes. TWENTY-FIVE! T-shirt incoming! 😁 Aaaanyway... back to the run. First time at Chopwell Wood and it was HARD . A few months back, I watched a YouTube video of some guy doing this course and... well, it didn't look too hard. He talked through the fact there were uphill sections, but in all honesty, they looked pretty easy. In hindsight, maybe it was just that they were easy for him and the camera wasn't showing the true extent of the hills. (He got a time of 23:50, btw. 😲) Whatever, it was definitely hard for me . Possibly the hardest one I've done, in fact. The walk to the start from the car park (seen above) was pretty typical of the trails we'd run: mostly gravel and small stones bedded nicely into mud. Nothing too squelchy, so mostly a decent running surface, though there were a few sections with larger, more rubble-like stones, but mostly smooth ones. Prior to turning up, I'd been a bit
Read more

5 months in with my Brooks Adrenaline GTS 22 shoes

Image
Summary : my Brooks trainers have worked miracles in the last 5 months and I couldn't be happier with them. Well, maybe if they'd been cheaper. 😉 And maybe a bit lighter. About 6 months ago, I splashed out a small fortune on the most expensive trainers I've ever bought. It was purely in the hope that they'd help with the pain I felt in my feet during and after running on even slightly uneven surfaces. That pain had made life outside of runs a bit miserable, with me unable to go around the house in stocking feet. After a run like that on the Town Moor, with its stony tracks, it could take months for my feet to get back close to normality. Even just walking on those surfaces in my old shoes caused pain. This was seriously limiting where I could run too. It was time to try something new, especially as my Nike Runallday were starting to feel like they'd suddenly lost a lot of their cushioning. In the end, I ventured into Start Fitness in Newcastle for gait analysis a
Read more