Training: Forest Hall and back

How prophetic! The last few words of my previous post were these:

"parkrun isn't a very solid fixture these days"

And lo! So it came to pass that I missed parkrun again. Given it was my noisy sleeping that gave my wife a terrible night's sleep and guilt-tripped me into giving her more time in bed, maybe I should sleep on the sofa prior to parkruns in the future. That should set me up splendidly! 😐

Anyway, after a weekend of IKEA wardrobe building, I finally got the chance for a run on Sunday evening. As has often been the case lately, it was an uninspired route, aimed at merely ticking the "5K" box. This time, it was a case of heading from West Moor to Forest Hall and back, mainly along Great Lime Road, Glebe Road, Briar Edge and Forest Hall Road, plus the odd little deviation into housing estates to bump up the distance.

Looking back to West Moor from Forest Hall. Image nicked from Google Earth.

As soon as I got moving, I could tell it wasn't going to be a quick time. My chest felt like it was labouring and my knees felt like they had no spring at all in them. But... it was just about keeping up the fitness. At least I'm still a million times better than I was before I started this whole running lark. To know that you can just keep going remains phenomenal. I would've quit after 500m in days gone by.

Anyway, looking back at my run data after the run, Google reckons I came within a second of getting the full set of negative splits again, failing only in the final kilometre, when I'd eased off a bit to protect a knee that was feeling iffy. And the overall time for the 5K was 26:17. which is completely fine for a run that didn't feel special. And even moreso given how much I noticed the smokiness of the air once I'd stopped; get the feeling there was some temperature inversion thing going on, trapping the pollution. Not great for my asthma.

Next run? Who knows? It's half term week, but I should be in the office all week. Fingers crossed I can get some lunchtime outings in.

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