July

For the first Saturday in July I made the trip down to Ayr to run my first parkrun in Rozelle park.  The route is like a horse shoe with an out and back followed by another out and back, then you do the first out and back again. Its a trail 5k with some sections on loose rocks along with mud so its not the fastest 5k but it is fun.  I had a good run and finished in 32 minutes. I had a look at other peoples times and worked out that compared with other parkruns the course is about 2 minutes slower so that was a good effort.

The middle 2 parkruns of the month were run at Pollok and both were terrible! I was run/walking both of them and they took over 34 minutes each.  I just wasn't feeling right.  I did do some midweek runs too but they were just as bad.

Yesterday I thought, is it going to be 3 bad parkruns in a row - but the answer really was no!  I got a shout out at the start because this was my 50th parkrun. Then about after a kilometer the event director came up from behind me and we started chatting and continued all the way to the end.  I was putting in a real effort while she was cruising. I thought I was going to walk a lot earlier but I managed to keep going up to the last steep incline on the second lap where I started walking for a few seconds, but Liz was having none of it and said to start running again.  So I made it round in 29.44!  It almost felt like a comeback run after so many bad runs and don't get me wrong it was tough. But now I feel I've got something to build on.

I can't believe I have run my 50th parkrun. At this point last year I wasn't even running and had run just 16 parkruns.  Now I have run 50.  I know I said at the start of the year I wanted to reach 50 volunteers at the same time, but running it became more important especially with my fitness levels at the moment.

Again the focus in August has to be to try and get the midweek runs in. I've signed up for a trail race near Strathclyde Park in September so hope to get in reasonable shape for that.