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Dog walks have been my main exercise this year- and it turns out that 60+ minutes of walking a day (with some stone clearing thrown in) is a great help in terms of reaching relative fitness. I’ve done the occasional run up the hill and managed 4km pretty easily. But I thought I’d check out my local
Park Runs and see if a regular Saturday 5k would help push me back towards the kind of fitness I enjoyed when I ran my last half marathon five years ago.
The big question was whether I could make it all work with my Saturday commitments. It’s quite early in the morning and this is the day I take my daughter to her gym glass in a different town. Could I get breakfasts etc done, drive to the run, complete it, drive home, shower and get my daughter to the class in time? If I could then this could be a regular fixture.
For this first one the whole family came along - if the worst came to the worst I could forgo my shower and still get everyone to the next appointment.
I hadn’t really known what to expect. I think I imagined there would be about 20 people there, but there was literally a million people waiting to start. Literally.
All right maybe 400, but that was still way more than I anticipated.
And this was a great start to a Saturday. Being part of a crowd means you run faster than you would on your own, though to be fair, it felt like I was going fast, but every time I looked at anyone around me I’d think that they looked like they were ambling along. But maybe I was running in some kind of a Time Cave. It was a good work out, but had all the run of doing an event and I was keeping up the kind of pace that should see me finish in 30 minutes. I kept pushing to overtake the person ahead of me, and by the second lap hardly anyone was overtaking me. And I finished in 29 minutes and 36 seconds in 198th place (so almost exactly in the middle of this huge crowd). My family were waiting for me at the end and my daughter seemed unusually proud of me and excited and wanted to hold my hand, asking if I’d won a trophy. So I felt like a hero (but told her only the first 197 places got a trophy so I’d just missed out).
We had a few little races back to the car.
And then we went home and I had my shower and then got to our next appointment with five minutes to spare. So it’s a go for Me2 to run next week to see if he can beat this time. They do these things all over the place. I never really fancied the communal run thing before, but I was a young fool. It’s lovely to see so many people of all kinds taking part.
And though I was pretty knackered for the rest of the day, it was the good kind of knackered where you feel a but healthier too and we had a fun family day, eating a really good lunch in a nice cafe restaurant, with no family member having a massive strop and embarrassing the rest of us. It was the least fractious thing we’ve done as a family so far. And there can be no greater compliment.
Later I found out i had come 17th in my age group (50-54) - and I was right behind the 16th place guy who was running with his dog (which doesn’t happen so much in races) so reckon I could take him next week. They also give you a grade in per centre terms so you can compare your result to other ages groups. I got 50.23% which means that I am a mere 10 percentage points away from being able to compete at a local level. So yeah, my daughter was right to be proud.
And a quick calculation shows that 5 years ago, at the height of my running fitness I could have done these 5k in about 23 minutes (and still run another 6k afterwards) so there is some room for improvement.
I think I will be back.
