2019 goals

As usual this year I have gone through the process of thinking about stepping up the distances in 2019 and applied for half marathon and a marathon. Then it comes to doing the training and it never seems to go to plan for the last few years for various reasons. Once again I am now thinking just purely to focus on parkruns and hopefully get my times down a bit.  I've broken down my aims below

Average time for parkruns - sub 30

My main focus this year will be on my average time for a parkrun over the course of the year.  These are my average times over the last 4 years:

2015 - 30.36 - 35 parkruns
2016 - 28.12 - 28 parkruns
2017 -  31.04 - 35 parkruns
2018 -  31.52 - 46 parkruns

I am aiming to try for sub 30 average which will be a challenging target going by previous years and especially if I end up doing hillier parkruns more like last year. But hopefully this will give me more focus during the week and mean it will be nessesary to do more speedwork/hill work.

Which parkruns to do?

I thought one of the things that worked well in 2018 and led to me running so many parkruns was running my home parkrun Pollok every second time. It keeps things interesting visiting other runs while still touching base regularly at Pollok.  The 10 for 10 challenge was also good as to get gold it was a case of getting out every week.  If a challenge does come along like that again I would be open to doing it.  I have a few planned parkruns down south already and I would like to do more different Scottish parkruns although I'm not really fussed which ones they are - just different ones to the ones I have done.  In saying that in terms of the Glasgow parkruns I am definitley aiming to get my p index to 7 which will take 4 runs. And hopefully get towards p index of 8 which it would take an extra 5 runs.  My plan is to stick to Glasgow runs during winter January to March, then November and December. Then April to October do runs further a field. While of couse doing Pollok every second week throughout the year.  But on top of that if anyone I know starts going they fancy doing this parkrun or that running that week I would change and just do that.

Milestones

The biggest milestone I should hit this year is my 200th parkrun. Currently I am on 175.  I am on course to also hit my 100th Pollok parkrun where currently I am on 88. This is the second year of my 3 year plan to hit 250. I beat my target last year giving me a bit of extra room in 2019.  So my target is to reach 210 parkruns this year, meaning 35 parkruns for the calender year. But of course anything on top of that is a bonus and I'm not planning on taking days off unless of course I need to.

Another target I should hit a quarter cowl which is 25th different parkrun location. I am on 23 at the moment so something would have to really go wrong not to hit that one. The next target after that is the half cowel which I will eat into next year but I'll be nowhere near hitting it due to other priorities.

Heatmapping

Not a parkrun goal.  This is just one to add some interest for me on my local runs.  It was inspired by an ultra runner in America called Rickey Gates who this year ran every street in San Francisco.  I'm not planning to run every street in Glasgow.  But I have got an area in the southside near to me that I want to run every street in. Not sure how many miles it is but I'll just see how this pans out throughout the year.