For February this was a pretty eventful month parkrun wise.
Going into the month I was on 248 parkruns so I was determined to get to 250 as
soon as I could. Especially because you don't know if cancellations are going
to hit given the unpredictable weather this time of year. I also had a
planned trip to Inverness at the end of the month, so I knew I needed to do 2
out 3 runs to get to 250 before I went to Inverness. Usually, I would try and
volunteer at a 5k once a month but due to the various factors that it wasn't
really plausible.
5th Feb - For parkrun 249 I was back at Queen's. This was my worst Queen's run in quite a while as I had to start walking the hills on the 3rd hill of the first lap, then walk all the hills on the 2nd and 3rd lap. I say worse but I don't beat myself up about it. I think it was being slightly out of practice with hills having missed the previous Saturday. My time on my watch was around 35 minutes but when I got my result it was at the higher end of 33 minutes. No point in giving the director extra work in this instance though as no PB and averages out when I got a time higher than expected last month.
12th Feb - Then suddenly it was my 250th parkrun. People celebrate milestones in different ways. Some make it public, inviting lots of people, having cake etc. Others just keep it quiet and just treat it like another run. Both ways both perfectly acceptable. I ended up being the latter. While I do know a lot more people at parkrun now that I could have said to, I just didn't really fancy the attention. (well till afterwards lol). But my Mum and Dad knew about it as we'd been counting down for months so they came along and my Dad told the run director who is a fellow Stuart who I know well so I got a shout out at the start. I also was quite indecisive as to whether to do Queen's or Pollok. Obviously, I started at Pollok and spent a lot of time there but more recently I have been at Queen's a lot more. In the end I opted for Queen's. That's the thing though. as I know quite a lot of folks now, there is always someone you know when you turn up to Queen's or Pollok and that happened today too. With the likes of Ian, Rodger, Jennifer, Martin and I'm sure there were others too.
In terms of the run itself I dipped just below the 33-minute mark, a
good 2 minutes faster than the previous week. This time I didn't start walking
bits of the hills till the second hill on the 2nd lap so gradually getting
better again. Then on the Sunday at Juniors word got around about my
250th and got a shout out from Finola who I run with on a Wednesday quite often
and was run director. And got cake in the cafe after which was very
nice. So, all in all a very enjoyable couple of days.
19th Feb - I can't really remember what I was planning to do for this one originally, but I got text on the Monday from my Dad saying he had tested positive for covid which meant I had to do a test every day for 10 days. I know I wasn't planning to do any trips anyway but meant I couldn't commit to volunteering either on the Saturday or Sunday. But I did test negative all week, so I was good to go to Queen's on the Saturday. This run I paced it a bit better and ran slightly faster than my 250 and only had to walk a bit of the last hill on the 3rd lap.
26th Feb - My Dad's isolation period finished with a few days to spare before our trip up to Inverness. I had done Inverness parkrun a few years back, but they moved location of the parkrun to a purpose-built course last year and changed the name of it to Torvean parkrun. This meant that it is basically a new parkrun and event count started at 0. I really liked the course. It was basically two horseshoes linked together. One outer horseshoe and one inner horseshoe which you alter between. So, you end up doing the inner one 3 times and the outer one 2 times. It was quite windy at points making it quite hard and the outer loop had some short steep hills. One of which had an escape route for buggies to go round it.
I had to walk bits of this but generally it was a good run and good to be on the tourist trail again. I was just over 32 minutes for this one although the actual result is over 33 minutes. Again, not impacting my PBs so no problem there.
Overall though a great month. I now have my 250 t-shirt, 250 pin badge and 250 barcode strap. Very proud of what I have achieved.
