Running On Empty

Run EIGHT! Eight times at one location! Good grief, how tedious! 😉 Anyway, despite still being desperate for a lie-in after getting back from Italy, I hauled my carcass out of bed this morning and headed to the nearest parkrun so I didn't hog the car for too long. Mercifully, the weather's been good recently, so I figured the Rising Sun was unlikely to have any muddy or outright waterlogged sections for once. Arriving, customarily, at the very last minute, I did a few stretches and joined the back of the throng. Turns out there were 352 runners here today; more even than when they held their 300th event. Even when it has around 200 runners (which I'm more used to), the start is a bit mad. Everyone's instantly funnelled onto a path that accommodates around 2½ runners shoulder-to-shoulder, with nettles, hedges, brambles and fences preventing an off-course overtake. The start of the Rising Sun parkrun, as seen in Google Earth Today, it was so bad that we jogged the 50 ya...

After having to cut short a first visit to Fountains Abbey last year, I was very keen to get back and I finally managed it almost exactly a year later. This Father's Day weekend, I'd booked a weekend away (timing was coincidental, not intentional) in Nidderdale , within easy reach of the National Trust venue... and this time, I'd been sneaky enough to ensure we were there on a Saturday morning. PARKRUN TIME! 😁 The start area for the Fountains Abbey parkrun, with the abbey itself in the background On my previous visit, I'd not managed to see any of the Studley Royal water gardens and had barely seen the abbey itself in passing. Having checked the route online, I knew I'd get to see both over the course of the 5K, and from all angles. The irony, of course, is that once you're running, there's often little time or inclination to enjoy the scenery — more often, I'm just fighting to keep going, both mentally and physically. That said, there was one moment ...

The last post on here was of a run on the 3rd June. Today, it's the 27th June. What happened?! Short answer is "not a lot". There were no more runs in that week; the weekend of the 8th June was spent visiting the in-laws again. The following Monday, the 10th, actually saw a run, albeit one of only 4.5km. The splits were pleasing though, with an average pace of 5:08//km after a much-slower first kilometre. Chest felt a bit dodgy after that, mind. Later that week, I squeezed in another run, albeit a very short one at just 3km. That was a lot slower too, but I console myself with the thought that any training is better than none. 🤷‍♂️ Since then, there's been only one other run and — shock horror! — it was actually a parkrun while on holiday . So yeah, both Penrhyn and Heslington may have failed to happen last year, but this Father's Day weekend, I made it to Fountains Abbey parkrun. I'll leave the write-up of that for another post. That, however, was nearly 2 w...

Finally, a day at work without compulsory lunchtime meetings. I'll keep this brief-ish, though. The Turnbull Building at the northern end of the High Level Bridge, courtesy of Google Earth In short, it was pretty damned warm out there for a run today; 19°C and full sun. I had an errand to run, however, and had promised the Wife that I'd pick up a gift voucher from the Biscuit Factory while out, so out I had to go. Aiming to do about 5K by the time I got there, I decided to weave across a couple of bridges before heading up the Ouseburn. The start went past the Black Gate and then skirted the Turnbull Building before heading down Hanover Street to the quayside. Along from that to the Swing Bridge and then past the Glasshouse and back over the Millennium Bridge. Straight down to Ouseburn from there and up past the Tyne Bar to Ouseburn Farm and up through the trees to Ernest and on to the Biscuit Factory. The Biscuit Factory art gallery; photo courtesy of tagvenue.com By the time...

Another worst-yet time at a parkrun today, but this time, I was still pretty pleased overall. 27:10 might be a minute and a half slower than my best at Whitley Bay, but it looks like a good chunk of it was down to a pretty slow start. With low expectations beforehand, I opted to start near the back of the field — which at 550-odd people was bigger than usual here — and allowed myself to get boxed in too. That meant that I spent the first few minutes running with the pacers in the 33 and 34 minute bibs. Once past them, it was a matter of just keeping a pace that I felt I could manage and hoping that that meant I passed a few more pacer bibs in the process. It felt slow going overall, but I did eventually crawl past those up to and including a guy in the 28 minute bib. After the poor start, that had been my baseline target; I didn't want another week of being slower than 28 minutes. Once I got beyond him, however, I realised I couldn't even see the 27-minute bib ahead...