I had mixed feelings about heading over to parkrun yesterday. I was out late (midnight) with the dad’s night out from Venla’s school and had been drinking (caffeine). So, my stomach was not feeling chipper Saturday morning. But I did want to try and run a quick parkrun so I put my fast shoes on.
When I got to the park, I did a warm-up lap. The paths were flooded and I tried to dodge around them but the grass was a marsh so I gave up on that plan. It was straight through them from then on. But ankle deep freezing cold water was not the start to my warm-up I imagined 😂.
It is a small parkrun and 14 of us lined up on the start line. The course takes in three laps of the park and each loop included 8-10 large puddles you had to run through. There was also a lot of mud on the corners so I had to take it easy there. I was in fourth on the first lap, but then the front runners went the wrong way and only the fifth runner knew which way to go, so it was the infamous peco incident all over again.
As well as the puddles and the mud, there was a massive headwind on the back half of the course. The wind was up to about 50 kph when I checked it after the run and it felt like it. It was so hard to keep going at any pace that I almost dropped down to a walk, and I was working at around 190 bpm at this point.
I crossed the finish line in 4th overall. This is an improvement on my previous overall best placement when I came 6th in a field of 79 at Fairview parkrun. I ran that in 22:32. Today, I managed:
23:21
That’s only about 20 seconds faster than I ran Father Collins parkrun despite pushing hard this week and using my super shoes, so that was disappointing.
There are lots of mitigating factors: I got there late and didn’t get a full warm-up, I had to slow down for the mud, the wind, I went the wrong way. With all of that gone, I would definitely be sub-23 and hopefully that will improve now I’ve added more structure into my training.
A big thank you to all of the volunteers who showed up despite the grim conditions.
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Tags: running
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2023 at 11:00 am and is filed under Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.