🏃 Parkrun #1 - 202 days until my first marathon!

Last Saturday I ran my first ever Parkrun in an official time of 21:54 (although I didn't turn off my GPS watch until a while after the finish hence the disparities); on a very muddy & sticky route that I had never run before, in 'feels-like' temperatures that were below -5 degrees, I thought it was definitely a time to share - so here goes!

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With over 200 days to go until I run the Bournemouth Marathon 2018 and still sometime before I'll plan to start intense marathon training, I've just been wanting to up my weekly mileage slowly and make sure that the increase during training is no shock to the system. I started running last August and although I ran nowhere near the pace I'm running at now, the intense weekly mileage of 30km+ wreaked havoc on my shins and ankles.

Just over 260 people managed to take part in this run and I came 11th, 5 seconds off finishing in the top 10 and I thought I did quite impressively for my first attempt. This is the local Parkrun when I'm not at Uni, and it's mostly on trails/grass so it's not as quick of a route than others. When I'm at Uni, my local Parkrun will be completely hard-surface so I can expect to run some pretty quick times the other end.

I was running the Parkrun with my older brother and last Summer on runs his fitness was massively better than mine so from the start I thought I'd just keep to his heels. A couple of times he managed to get a few metres ahead but for the majority of the race I kept up with him. On the second lap, we met some dreadful, strong and bitterly cold headwind and it was quite tough going, it took me a large stretch to recover and my brother had made about 10 metres on me by that point. The runner behind me attacked as we were going around the lake and I knew the pace he was holding was the fastest he could possibly do, so I ramped my efforts up to sub 4:00m/km paces and quickly reached my brother before passing him and catching up to the runner about 20m in front of him. Coming into the last 500m I knew that runner was stronger than me so my best chance would be an early attack and get enough ground between me and him so that a sprint to the line was unlikely - unfortunately that tactic didn't work and he matched my pace before bettering it, finishing a good 5 seconds or so in front of me and my brother finishing the same interval behind me.

When I first started running it was after a lazy first year at Uni that was largely attributed to unhealthy living and lots of alcohol consumption. I struggled to run 500m at a 5:00m/km pace without hitting heart-rates in the high 180s, and needing walking breaks. My form has definitely come far from then, and I know it won't be long until I'll be running 18 or 19 minute Parkruns!

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