Midweek: Jesmond Dene House

Ok, so where's the Penrhyn parkrun blog post?! In short, the fates conspired against it. First, I forgot to take my trainers to Wales. 🤦‍♂️ Then the car got a cracked windscreen the day before it that worsened with every trip. Then Storm Betty arrived and the parkrun was cancelled for fear of falling trees. Sigh. 6 months I'd been looking forward to that. SIX MONTHS. 😞

The lack of decent trainers on holiday also meant I didn't get any other runs in during my time in Wales, as I wanted to protect my feet ahead of the parkrun. So it's nearly two weeks since my last run. This is ruining my goal to be consistent. The lack of parkruns — I'll be doing none at all in August now — is also jeopardising my goal of 30 this year. But... back to today.

Seeing that I had no real meetings booked for today, I slapped a blocker on 90 minutes over lunch for a slightly longer than usual run. Being content to just run and not caring where I went for once, I ended up running up to the Blue House Roundabout before heading to the top of Matthew Bank and back to the town centre via Jesmond Dene House, Cradlewell, and Shieldfield. The weather was pretty toasty (22°C), but I wasn't running hard, kept to what shade there was and was cooled occasionally by a gentle breeze.

The pace trace from Google Fit tells the story of the run quite nicely. Started off slowly and gathered pace over the first 3km as I settled in... and then I started getting tired. Perhaps surprisingly, the slightly downhill return was slower than the slightly uphill outbound leg. Can a couple of weeks off running really make that much of a difference to my stamina?

Have to say, everything from 4km onwards felt like a proper slog. The run along Jesmond Dene Road, on which I passed the house (actually a restaurant) in the photo above, felt interminable. And thereafter it was a matter of simply wanting to add a purple splodge to my running calendar i.e. wanting to exceed 7.5km overall. To be honest, I would've been happy to stop after a solid 5km, but I was a long way from the office at that point. Walking back would take a long time, so I figured I might as well go for the next box to tick — which I did, with a final distance of 7.79km.

The rest of this week needs to be dedicated to getting as much running in as possible if I'm not too slide further backwards. On Friday, we're off on another holiday, which probably means another week of not running. I'll try to get 2 more lunchtime runs in on Wednesday and Thursday. Fingers crossed. Or rather, time to add some fake meetings to my work calendar. 😉

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