Running On Empty

Fifty down... finally. 😅 Yep, while my 25th parkrun felt like a major cause for celebration, this milestone was quite a bit more subdued. Had I hit it while still on the streak that saw me attend 29 parkruns in a year, it would've felt a lot better, with a good chunk of momentum behind me, but today felt like I'd barely crawled over the line. That said, typing this a couple of days later, it does feel good to put it behind me. And to have run in two consecutive parkruns for the first time this year feels good too. It's almost a glimpse of how good it felt throughout the majority of last year, attending more often than not. I hope I can build on this. 💪 In the end, the choice of venue came down to me not wanting to disappoint myself; so Chopwell Wood was out of the question. I'd simply not done enough running, let alone hill work, in the weeks leading up to this to give myself a chance of feeling good about such a hilly run. But I did want to attend somewhere that wou...

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...

Just a very quick post to record and celebrate the fact that Daughter the First was presented with her Half Marathon wristband at yesterday's junior parkrun on the Town Moor. Congratulations, popplet! ❤️ She also got a time that was almost half a minute better than her previous week. Get in there. 😁