Running On Empty

Yep, an actual parkrun. And a new location, to boot. On holiday, no less. Wonders may never cease. It's too much of a cliché to have your photo taken next to the venue sign, right? So I went meta instead and took a photo of someone having their photo taken. In the days leading up to today, the weather has been glorious. Today, we got Lake District weather, albeit with only cloud and not rain. Nevertheless, it was lovely to be out in a fresh, green landscape and on a course that was new to me. In terms of challenge, it felt similar to Morpeth. Two laps and with a brief but notable climb. Here, however, you only had to do that climb once rather than the three times you get in Morpeth. Mostly running on grass, and with a decent dew, meant my feet got a bit soaked even before we'd started. The trail shoes were a bit unnecessary, but I wasn't sure what to expect . 🤷 Given this was my first timed event in 6 months, I really wasn't expecti...

Welcome to 2026! And good riddance to 2025! (I have my reasons.) Last post here was mid-November, so what have I been doing running-wise since then? Missing lots of parkruns, for various reasons: visiting in-laws, ill health, work stuff, and ferrying Daughter the First to her volunteering sessions at a local stable Managing to get out for a single 4K run (big whoop) Adding about 3 kilos in weight over Christmas and New Year Trying to attend a parkrun today, only to be scuppered by last-minute snow Needless to say, I'm not feeling the fittest I ever have done and I suspect I'm back to square one with my parkrun fitness revival. Hey ho. 🤷‍♂️ Sunrise at Blyth Links parkrun this morning, just after we'd been told it was cancelled I'd hoped to at least get 2026 off to a good start by doing both the New Year's Day run (at Newbiggin) and the regular Saturday run a couple of days thereafter. A banging headache and accompanying lack of sleep did for the fi...

Very quick post to say 2 things:  1. Volunteering at Leazes Park last weekend was called off due to the course being icy (the event was cancelled)  2. I'm unlikely to make it to any parkrun this coming weekend, volunteering or otherwise, as the family (including me) has some kind of plague (read: flu-like symptoms, but not COVID, apparently) So... zero exercise happening right now. Fingers crossed for Saturday 6th (though I'm competing with Tynemouth Christmas Market that day). 🤞

Groundhog Day! Last week, at Druridge Bay, I came 78th out of 161 finishers. This week, at Druridge Bay, I came 78th out of 161 finishers. Head asplode! 🤯 As for my time, it was 28:31, which was very similar to last week’s lateness-corrected time, but not identical. A little slower, in fact, but I’ll let myself off, as I did zero exercise midweek this time. The beach at Druridge Bay, but last week. Forgot to take any photos today. 🤷 I also had my running buddy back with me today, which was great and her positivity probably helped keep away the thoughts of “Why am I doing this to myself?” that I’ve been getting midway through the run. She even got me a coffee at the end, which was very welcome after the chilly wind outside had started to cool me down a bit. So anyway, I’ve run around the 28:30 mark 3 times now since returning to parkrun and it’s starting to feel like that’s my new plateau. Either I need to up my midweek game or I have to get comfortable with this level of achievement...

LATE! 😱 For the first ever time, I actually missed the start of a parkrun. I came close at Denton Dene once, but this time, I was actually about 45 seconds late getting to the start line. Things that didn't help: Having to do a U-turn just after I set off, as the barriers came down on the level crossing I was approaching Google Maps giving me the time it would take to reach the entrance to Druridge Bay Country Park rather than the car park that's a few minutes inside Me foolishly trying to find a space in the main car park, which was inevitably full Me casually taking photos for the blog instead of getting to the start line Me forgetting where the actual start line was and heading to the briefing area instead All in all, #FAIL. Yes, nice illustration of the wet conditions, but... GET TO THE START LINE, YOU IDIOT! Putting all of that to one side, remember I came back to Druridge Bay for a reason? The low-hanging fruit of a slow PB at a flat venue? Well... Previous best: 27:44 ...

A solo parkrun visit today, for the first time in a while. Certainly made getting out of bed a little harder than usual, but managed it nonetheless. Time: 30:34 (official parkrun time) Weather: 12°C and breezy Or, from my own timing as I crossed the start and finish lines, a much more satisfying 29:57. Yeah, I took quite a while to even reach the start line, but then there was a field of 603(!) runners and I was towards the back of that crowd. Oh, and a new record today: my worst ever finishing position of 380th. 😂 (That is, if you exclude the sole 5K I did with Daughter the First, when I came 530th). Heading North up the promenade offers a good view of the lighthouse on St Mary's Island It's still feeling like a bit of a slog, this parkrunning lark, but at least I'm in less doubt these days about whether I'll complete the 5K without walking. Pace was pretty consistently around the 5:40/km mark today, with a min of 5:36 and max of 5:45, but any thoughts of a sprint fi...

NINE! Nine runs at one venue. Whatever happened to the tourism thing? Result: 31:08. At a flat venue too, but I'm gonna let myself off given how congested the start is here. I'd practically done 2km before I was able to run at my own pace. Sadly, "my own pace" wasn't even quite what I'd hoped for, with a best pace of 5:41/km. The day before, on a training run, I'd managed 5:30ish. And the week before, I'd managed some around 5:20/km. So, improvement's proving a bit slow in coming. 🤷‍♂️ Swallow Pond at Rising Sun Country Park. Not today.  Photo © Oliver Dixon ( cc-by-sa/2.0 ) Any positives from this weekend's run? I turned up and I did it. Keeping the momentum is as important as anything else. It was hard. If I'm not finding it hard, I'm probably not helping myself to improve. The first couple of kilometres genuinely felt comfortable; though maybe that's because they weren't fast 😂 Yes, I realise points 2 and 3 kinda contrad...

It was all going so well... 😂 So, the chart I cheerily presented in the previous post , which showed the percentage gap to my venue PB coming down nicely, now looks like this: Seems like having a parkrun week off doesn't do much for your progress. Who knew?! Ooof. I guess it's a bit of a reality check, with yesterday's official time being 31:33, but there are still positives here: It makes me feel even better about the Chopwell Wood run in particular 😁 Jesmond Dene's not an easy run anyway, and this time's still closer to my venue PB than the 2 recent Morpeth runs I intentionally started slowly to avoid kerfuffle and barging in the tight early sections, so the time isn't exactly a shock I'd had to abandon a run after just 2K the previous day because I felt so bad, yet I managed the full 5K on a tough parkrun I had negative splits the whole way and even dipped below a 5:30/km pace for the final 2km Oh, and here's another positive: Sharing the run with s...

Three weekends on the trot! Get in. 💪 This time, it was a return to Prudhoe Riverside, though it turned out the course had changed slightly. Instead of starting alongside The Spetchels , the course started about half a mile(?) upriver, just underneath the Bridge of Terror: Ovingham Bridge. The terror comes from driving through the stone pinch points at each end. It then looped back on itself just past the original start line —  seeing the elite runners pelt past me in the opposite direction at that point caught me somewhat off-guard — before heading off for a solitary lap around the Spetchells, but in the opposite direction to previously. That meant that steep downhill at the end of the loop became a steep uphill at its start instead. Mercifully, it's nowhere near as prolonged as the hills at Chopwell Wood. Or even at Morpeth, for that matter. On the whole, the course always was pretty flat and the extension of the riverside section has just made it even moreso. Which takes a...

So, back to Chopwell Wood as a parkrunner for the first time since my 25th parkrun . My time? 31:11. I'll come back to that later. Anyway, I feel like a lot has changed in the 2 and a bit(!) years since that first time — giving up running, turning 50, leaving my job, and probably more — but it's lovely to see that this parkrun venue and its volunteers haven't changed; they're both still delightful. While the Morpeth parkrun has more than doubled in size (60ish to 130ish runners) and lost some of its intimacy, this run at Chopwell Wood was still a pleasingly small affair, with just 45 runners. Maybe it's the hills putting people off, maybe it was the weather (raining for once), but the event remains just how I like it. 🥰 Weather was 11°C and light rain throughout. Felt cold, but I warmed up plenty. So, yeah, my third parkrun back and I was still clocking well over 30 minutes. And I was nearly 4 minutes slower than my previous best time here. But... at Morpet...

And 5 weeks later, i returned to parkrun, and to Morpeth at that. No runs in between; no training at all. But this time, I tried harder from the get-go. Result? 25 seconds faster. In all honesty, as happy as I am with having hauled my carcass back to a parkrun, I'm a bit disappointed with that time. Yes, I know I didn't exactly help myself by not running AT ALL in the last 5 weeks, but I genuinely thought that if I just set off a bit faster this time, I'd take a minute or two off my previous effort. Well... that reality check landed hard. 😳 On the upside, this time I had zero pain from the knees. 5 weeks ago, I was really feeling it in my left knee the day after the run and feeling the same disappointment that led to me stopping in the first place. This time, nothing. The biggest issue I had was that 3-weeks-and-counting chest cough meant I wheezed my way round the course. What else to say...? 🤔 Oh, the weather was perfect . 11°C and sunny, with bl...

What the...? Yep, I'm back. Which is kinda laughable, as I've said stuff like that before and then promptly done nothing. Moving on... Since the previous post, it's fair to say I've done very little exercise. The training for the Race for Life simply didn't materialise. Daughter #1 decided she didn't really want to go parkrunning again. Or any kind of running for that matter. And I didn't press it or do any of my own training other than a short, stop-start run alongside the kids' bikes and a 3km run to Weetslade that saw me abort. Even the Race for Life itself was mostly a walk.  And then... today. After several weeks of good intentions but failure to dig out my gear and set a parkrun alarm on a Friday night, I finally did it. It helped that I was committed to giving a friend a lift to her 50th parkrun too. But however it happened, the point is that it happened.  Long story short, I got a time of 31:23 at Morpeth. And that was me trying . While that'...

Another Saturday, another attempt to tick off one of the 27-minute-plus venues on my parkrun list. I'd had 3 previous goes at the Gateshead run and it feels slightly surprising that all 3 of them had been over 27 minutes. It doesn't feel like it should be that hard a parkrun... until you're doing it. And then the run up the slope from the lake kills you on all 3 of the laps you do it. Well, make that all 4 laps, as you do the climb up from the lake on the opposite-direction first of four laps too. Yeah, it's an unusual lap setup here. Saltwell Towers in the rain; pity the parkrun course doesn't go around this place On my previous visits, my times had been: 27:28 on 17 Sep 2022 27:11 on 14 Jan 2023 27:01 on 11 Mar 2023 So, clear if somewhat slow improvement. And today? 26:21. 🥳 It probably helped that, in hindsight, I started a little closer to the front than my times merited, though it wasn't like I was swamped . I did overtake a good number of people too. ...

Now that I've semi-committed myself to aiming for the "every local parkrun under 27 minutes" goal, it was time to return to one of the 5 local venues where I've yet to do that. And Windy Nook had my slowest time of the lot, at 27:48. The start line at Windy Nook, which was looking lovely today When I'd registered that time, I was delighted with it, as I'd heard Windy Nook was possibly the toughest course in the area. I'd been expecting a time worse than my 28½ minutes at Jesmond Dene. I also came away thinking the course wasn't as hilly as reputed. In hindsight, I probably went into today's run a bit complacent as a result. And I found it HARD today. 🥵 Way more gradients than I'd remembered. Even the bits I'd remembered as roughly flat were uphill; it's just that they led to steeper sections. Google Fit's usual poor choice of Y axis scaling fails to show off the hills here 👀 I probably didn't help myse...

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 ...

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...

Wow. Well... that was a break. Two full weeks without a single run. 😮 Just about made it in time for the run director's welcome And straight back into it with a parkrun. It's maybe not that surprising then that the following text greeted me later that morning: 28:15 is one of my slowest ever parkrun times. And I was actually trying! Even as I was running, I tried to guess my time and felt it would be just over 28 minutes. That's not to say I wasn't disappointed when it was confirmed, mind. Last time out, I thought I'd gone slowly at Denton Dene only to find out I'd smashed my previous best there by over a minute. But not this time. 😞 Views looking upriver (along the parkrun route) and downriver past the weir So, other than the lack of practice, what might've contributed to the slow time? It's not my fastest course — a best of 26:02 — and while it has 3 short hills on it, it's no Chopwell Wood or Jesmond Dene. And there was probably about 15-20 sec...

Well, thanks to my epic ineptitude, there was no orienteering this weekend after all; I'd completely forgotten that you need to book your place a week in advance . 🤦‍♂️ So much for bagging another bunch of British Orienteering ranking points at an event in which I felt more confident (urban). Hey ho. I would say "live and learn", but this isn't the first time I've forgotten about the need to book early, so I'm clearly not learning. 🤷‍♂️ On the upside, it meant I felt free to attend a parkrun for the third week on the trot. This is becoming something of a habit again. 😁 The course twice takes you past the Newcastle Blue Star ground, which is canny. This time, I chose to return to Denton Dene. I'd actually hoped to get to Blackhill in Consett, as the park would probably look quite nice in the sunshine, but I left it far too late to get ready in the morning, meaning a more local event was all I could manage. And even then, I cut it fine, arriving at the c...

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...