The big goal for this year was to complete all the Scottish parkruns and as you will have seen from my previous post I did achieve this just last month. I did go into detail in that post about it so I won't say anything more about that in this post.
Instead I'm going to be analysing my actual running and other milestones. In terms of running parkruns I achieved my 300th parkrun in June, very appropriately at the home of parkrun, Bushy park. I also wanted to get nearer to 50 parkruns at Queen's, my home parkrun. Where I am now at 48, having started the year at 32. I was also looking to do more parkruns around Glasgow that I have not done in a while. This I didn't quite achieve as I really just did Pollok, Linwood and Drumchapel outside of Queen's.
What about times, well this is where it went a bit wrong you could argue.
2017 - 31.04 (35 runs)
2018 - 31.52 (46 runs)
2019 - 30.33 (44 runs)
2020 - 31.40 (64 runs) - (a lot of not parkruns)
2021 - 30.59 (16 runs) - (only included actual parkruns which started up half way through the year due to covid)
2022 - 33.21 (35 runs) - 2 tailwalks not included
2023 - 34:48 (36 runs) - 1 tailwalk and 1 park walk not included
The sub 30 minute run never came this year and in fact my fastest time came up in Shetland at 31.58. Obviously doing all the hilly courses back in Glasgow didn't really help the average.
But where did it go wrong. Well I have been looking at my Strava for the year. There were actually only 4 weeks of the year where I didn't do any running at all. But I think the key is that there were only 4 weeks of the year where I did 3 runs in a week. In previous years I would do 3 runs a week most weeks fine. I also never went above 3 miles for any run where as previous years I would have done at least the odd 4 1/2, 6 mile run. I think one of the reasons is I'm kind of set to do runs on Monday's and Wednesdays after work and if I miss them I don't think oh I'll do it some other time. I just won't go out any other time. Somehow need to get some more flexibility and creativity in the schedule. Something I'll be thinking about more over the break.
In terms of volunteering I reached the v250 milestone very early on the year. I did wonder if I would reach v300 but fell short at 297. So this should be one I can grab early next year. I also reached my 200th stint at Rouken Glen juniors and my 600th attendence day at any parkrun (Volunteering days and running days combined).
Based on this year I think its clear I need to make changes to my running in order to improve. I also need a new challenge which is something I have been thinking a lot about too. I'll be going into this more in the next post about my 2024 plans.
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