Parkrun #18: Leazes Park

Ugh. This was not a good run for me, so let's cut to the chase: my time was 27:38.

That compares pretty unfavourably to both my first run here (26:16) in July and my freedom run here (25:39) in October. Right now, I'm feeling pretty glum about it all. I miss the days when I could aim for a PB every time I went out.

Photo of the birdlife at Leazes Park, courtesy of Saleem Shahid on Flickr

Not sure what else to write today. Weather-wise, it was 10°C and raining constantly, which was actually ok for running. The wet ground did mean that I avoided overtaking people early on, as I didn't want to ruin my new shoes on the muddy grass at the sides of the path.

In contrast to my previous parkrun here, I also started very close to the back of the field, which perhaps says something about my mental state heading into this. It took, by my counting, about 12 seconds to cross the start line.

And I very nearly didn't bother attending at all; I'd had a poor night's sleep and just cancelled my parkrun alarm when it went off. I eventually dragged myself out of bed at 7:55 when one of the girls came to demand breakfast.

None of the above, however, can be used as an excuse. The reality is I'm still not running enough each week (I'd not run at all since the last parkrun) and, frankly, my heart's just not in it at the moment. 😞

And on that sad note, I'll end this post. Till next time... 👋

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