Running On Empty

With a meeting-free day, there was time for another longer run at lunch today. Still desperate to find new patches of greenery, I headed out eastwards towards Cycle Route 72, which would take me to Walker Riverside Park. You'd be forgiven for thinking the Tyne Valley were some lush green paradise looking at this! Must admit, it was a bit of a boring, well-trodden route out along the quayside and past the Cycle Hub to St Peter's Basin. Really wasn't feeling it today, but it would have felt wrong to not do anything over 5K in the week before Sunday's Great North 10K. I'd planned to maybe go as far as Pottery Bank and then just turn around, but by the time the cycle path crossed a bridge over a road about 24 minutes into the run, I figured I just didn't have time for it; I still couldn't see Pottery Bank ahead. Pausing the run, I checked my distance so far and it was about 4.5K. If I doubled that with the return leg, then even without going any further, that wo

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

(And post #100!) I knew I should've got these retrospective posts written sooner if I wanted to actually remember anything of the events. As it is, my scattered memories mean I've got only enough content for a post if I bundle all of the remaining ones together. 🤦‍♂️ Let's do it... Town Moor : the main thing I remember about this run was the occasional sudden, intense pain I got from the stones on the tracks at the eastern edge of the moor. The course page for Town Moor says "gravel", but really, it's not gravel. It's moderately loose, sizeable aggregate type stones set on and into a track that's often baked hard. With my old trainers, that was about the worst possible surface I could encounter and there were a few times I hopped and stumbled in pain after catching a stone just right . Little wonder I vowed to stay away until I got better trainers. The time of 26:11 was just a second shy of my PB at the time and it's fair to say I could've bea

Back to another parkrun with uneven ground to show it who's boss, this time with my Brooks trainers on, aiming to beat my previous time of 27:12. Well, that was the hope, tempered by the knowledge it was bloomin' hot. But at least the Prudhoe run's in the trees, I figured. Anyway, did I do it? YES. 26:08. Over a minute better! The Spetchells , a ridge of calcium carbonate spoil from a WW2 factory There are some other notable stats from today though. First of all, it's the day before my first parkrun birthday. Which, to me, means it is my parkrun birthday. 😁🎉 Also interesting to note is that I've done 30 parkruns in one year, which would get me the first tier of the Parkrun Obsessive achievement in the app (had it been a period from January to December). 30 runs is also one of my targets for 2023. And finally, today's run took me to my 11th consecutive different venue, giving me a tourist streak equal to my best streak to date. Speaks to my dislike of routine

Two runs in two days! This is me doing my best to really get back into the rhythm of at least 3 runs a week. And, at the same time, trying to get over my frustration at how hard I'm finding the 5K distance in the current heat. Basically, I've figured I simply need to up my game and today that came in the form of a longer distance run (7.5km), running home from work. I'd like to say it felt as easy as the time I ran into work, but it really didn't. And this time, I wasn't even carrying a rucksack. But from the word go, I just felt tired . Not sure whether it was the time of day, the heat (20°C), the fact I'd run yesterday, general lack of fitness, the fact I've had a lot of late nights recently, or some other plausible excuse. The feeling I had was also reflected in my pace, with an average of 5:49/km according to Google Fit. Slightly depressing, but at least if I maintained that for 10K, I'd be under an hour; 58:06, to be precise. I'd definitely lik

For the first time in what feels like quite a while, it was a midweek lunchtime run from the house today. Once again looking for a route that would have a fair bit of shade, I headed for the trees of Gosforth Park, running up to the northern edge of the Parklands golf course before cutting back through the middle of it and back home via the Triangle. According to onthegomap, it was exactly 5K, even if my phone's GPS struggled through the trees and recorded less than that due to apparent shortcuts. On the whole, it was an okay run in terms of how it felt, but the heat was draining again, with the temperature at 22°C. The pace was... actually, I've just looked at overall time for the first time in the context of knowing the true distance and the pace was actually really good considering the weather. The overall time for the 5K was 25:49, translating to 5:10/km. Go me! 😁 Anyway, most importantly, it was a second run of the week after a couple of weeks with very littl

Barely scraping two runs in two weeks is definitely not the way to prepare for your first 10K event. But even just putting my training gear on to go to work this morning felt magnificent . It seems weird to miss the discomfort of exertion, but miss it I have done. Let's hope I'm able to keep it up this time. So yeah, last week was written off after Monday's run, as I caught some kind of bug that ruined me for a few days (mainly via the gift of a prolonged, intense headache plus general fatigue) and then another weekend away happened (no parkrun). So today it was awesome just to get out. I didn't care where I ran — I just wanted to run. In the end, I did just 4.5K before the combination of my pace (5:15/km) and the heat (21°C) saw me cave at the bottom of Side and seek the shadows. Despite my route being mostly flat with a short stretch of downhill, it was exhausting. I ran from work, through the railway tunnel to the Telegraph, around Central Square South(?) and the Boi

After an awesome weekend away in the Yorkshire Dales (albeit with no running), it was back to work today... and back to trying to regain the running rhythm. Over the weekend, summer arrived with a vengeance, temperatures hitting 30°C in Yorkshire. Newcastle today was a bit cooler, but I still ended up running in an energy-sapping 24°C and midday sun. 🥵 Brimham Rocks in the Yorkshire Dales, this last weekend Mercifully — though it wasn't really the goal at the outset — I ended up running in a fair bit of shade. My route took me across the High Level Bridge (shaded) and then immediately right, looking for a way down to quayside level through the trees that I normally see on my left when running upriver. As I'd suspected, there was such a path (shaded), but it was a pretty steep descent and I was down to river level in no time. From there, I tried to stay in the green and found a gently sloping path back in. A few more such stretches (shaded) and I found myself arriving at the d

Blah, Chinatown, blah, science buildings, blah, Fenham, blah, Nuns Moor, blah, BBC, blah, Leazes Park, blah, back to work. Yep, that really is my write-up; at least, in draft form. The arch at the entrance to Stowell Street aka Chinatown   I wasn't expecting to run today. I didn't really have anywhere to go in mind (yet again). And as I left the office, the grey skies and cool temperatures did little to lift my mood or provide motivation. I definitely couldn't be bothered to put in a hard run, so I figured I'd just wander a bit at a slower pace, but get more distance under my belt. Even as I started, I wasn't sure where that would take me, but on heading past Monument, I suddenly fancied checking out Stowell Street, passing all the Chinese and Korean restaurants I've not been in for years, and seeing whether Hanahana is still going. (Turns out it is.) Continuing to totally make it up, I then doubled back and ran alongside the city walls (part of whi

I'm getting slack at writing up these runs. I came back to the draft of this one a whole week after I first started it (though I've kept the original date) and all I found was "Blah. Cows." Plus a photo. Here's the photo: So... cows. That means I headed back to the Town Moor, just a couple of days after I'd done the parkrun there. When I set off from work, I think the main plan was to head towards Exhibition Park, Wylam Brewery and the old boating lake. By the time I'd skirted the shoppers by heading up John Dobson St, I just wasn't really feeling the route up past the Robinson Library, so I headed up Claremont Road instead. There was the odd pause as I crossed roads, but I didn't think I'd been that slow. Google thought otherwise: over 11 minutes to do 2K by the time I'd hit the town moor. A 5:30/km pace. I'd been hoping to maintain a pace more like 5:10/km. 😦 From that point on, I wanted to make up for the slow start. I

[10:35am] Oh deary me. This was my first run of any kind since the previous weekend's parkrun. I'm chalking that up to a combination of half term, work deadlines, and preparations for Daughter the Second's birthday. And, if I'm honest, a lack of dedication. Anyway, not the best way to prepare for a parkrun. Very much an afterthought of a photo; the finish area as I walked away This was the first time I'd been back to the Town Moor to test out the Brooks trainers on the awkward stones and baked, uneven overtaking fringes there. Verdict: they worked. I mean, I'm now walking around town feeling a small amount of discomfort, but nothing like I would get with the old trainers. And at the time, I felt confident to run on anything. I was actually more concerned that I'd turn my ankle on the uneven ground. And my time, for an almost perfectly flat course? I've not got it yet, but I'm expecting about 26:20. There's a number of factors in play h