Where it all went wrong!

            On the 28/10/07 I ran my first ever 10km. Now 10km might seem a strange place to start but my mum was going for a tri club run and I said “oh I might come along” (not really having any concept of how long 10km actually was), mums reply was “you’ll never be able to run that far with no training” and that was it-my mind was made up. Off I went and I found that if I ran at mums pace (which was fairly slow) then I was fine, once we were near the end mum told me the route and said “go on, go off ahead” so off I ran to do the last 2km alone (of course within 200 meters I had gone too fast and had to ease back) but I finished the 10km and didn’t feel too bad and that was my first real experience of running as an adult.

I can’t remember how I first heard of parkrun; I think it must have been an email from the university gym. Anyway on Saturday 03/11/07 I ran my first parkrun-Leeds parkrun event number 5. Like most people when they start running, I pushed too hard, felt too slow and although I was pleased to have done it I didn’t enjoy it enough to go back the following week. Without mum to pace me I found the whole 5km tough. In fact it was over 6 months before I ran my 2nd parkrun. Event number 38. I ran 5 seconds faster than before (this is WAY before I discovered Nike+ or Garmin). Still felt pretty slow (although I was running HARD and was totally out of breath) but I had obviously found ‘my pace’ ~32 minutes, close to the back of the field, not fast but getting round as quick as my legs would take me. Or to be precise my lungs, as I have always played sports, netball, football, squash etc my legs were fine but my lungs! They were on fire! I still didn’t particularly enjoy it but I was awarded my first ever PB! Now until the 21/06/08 I didn’t even know what a PB was but I am the first to admit I am SUPER competitive and I was rather pleased with my PB. It wasn’t anyone else’s; only mine and I had earned it. Personal Best…..I quite like the sound of that!

On the 26/07/08 I ran my 3^rd parkrun, event number 43, I still didn’t get it “these people turn up EVERY week to do this??! What’s wrong with them?” I figured they didn’t have my social calendar and certainly not my monster hangovers “its 9am…..ON A SATURDAY, why are we all in this park instead of in bed?” But…….when I was emailed my results later that day-there it was. My 2^nd PB! I’d done it again 31.02 and I had decided that, although I hated the running (and I was adamant about that fact) I rather enjoyed the smug feeling of getting a PB!

So, I hear you ask “where did it ‘go wrong’ then?” I’ll tell you. Friday 22^nd August was my birthday involving drinking, celebrating and definitely NO parkrun the following morning. Mum came to visit me the following weekend and my birthday present was a Nike+ band. Now mum was not sporty when she was younger but when she turned 50 she had a ‘fit and 50’ slogan and was running, entering triathlons etc and I think mum was quite excited that I had started running (I don’t think I had told her I hated running). Mum had also given me a pod to attach to your laces that held the ‘chip’ that communicated with the band on your wrist and calculated how far you had gone. So the Saturday that mum was here we went on a slow 7km trot to test out the Nike+ band. We got back and mapped our route online and found that the band was over a mile out! Oh dear, a running fail! Mum decided this must be due to the chip being in a pod on my laces rather than in the shoe “it’s supposed to be in the shoe” so off we went, into town, to look for some ‘Nike+ running shoes’.

In 2008 running had not yet become fashionable and the Nike+ band can’t have been launched for that long as in the sports shop they only had men’s trainers that were Nike+ compatible AND THEY WERE £80! “They’re WAY too expensive” I said (unconvinced by the Nike+ band in the first place and remember I hadn’t yet told mum that I hated running!). Mum said “Oh let’s just get them” and being a girly girl an ingrained rule of my life was ‘NEVER TURN DOWN A PAIR OF SPARKLY NEW SHOES’ I’m still not convinced that this phrase wasn’t asterisked with ‘unless they are a men’s size 8 and have no heel’! So, we went home with my sparkly new shoes and on the Sunday morning we went for a 4km slow jog: Nike+ Test No. 2. It worked (to this day I still do not know how that first run was so far out, in retrospect I think it can’t be because of the pod-who knows!) we had run 4km and mapping the route online there it was 4km. I was now a teched up runner!

            The pressure that having a new expensive pair of running shoes and a Nike+ band meant that I had to get myself out of bed on a Saturday morning and get to parkrun. On average I ran one parkrun a month for the next six months (OK so it’s not hugely impressive but it was a start!). At Leeds parkrun events 51 and 52 I ran two more PB’s getting down to a time of 28.50 (4 minutes faster than my first parkrun) which would prove difficult to beat and would remain my PB for almost a full year.

Not getting new PB’s meant that parkrun didn’t give me the excitement I needed to keep me going so in a moment of madness I signed up for the Leeds Half marathon. Now I’m not sure what I was thinking but I think it must have been along the lines of “it would be nice to be able to say that I have run a half marathon!” I don’t think I had quite thought it through. Anyway….I trained, got a knee injury two weeks before and had to rest. I was trying to beat mums half time of 2hr 45mins and had no idea if I would achieve it or not. In retrospect, now that I have run a marathon, my thoughts during training make me giggle “I better not run the full distance while training, 13 miles is SO far”, “I can’t eat anything beforehand or I’ll get a stitch” and “I can only drink water, that Gatorade stuff is HORRIBLE!” These things combined with my training got me round in 2.19.12, by the end I was so hungry I was convinced I was going to faint! After eating a MASSIVE burger I decided that I was pretty pleased with my time. :)

That year (2009) I ran 21 parkruns (all at Leeds) and I got my PB down to 28.20. I had caught the parkrun bug. I had become one of the crazy people running round the park at 9am most Saturdays instead of respectably laying in bed, respecting what Saturdays are for and nursing a hangover. I had found out about the 50 Club and I wanted my 50 T-shirt! I took part in the first Red Welly Relay (go girls!) and made a few friends at parkrun. The following year I ran 29 parkruns (although did no other races, only parkrun and one virtual Nike+ 10km; The Human Race), joined the parkrun 50 club, and ran at Coventry, Brueton and Norwich parkruns (the last of which my sister helped to set up and is race director at after I made her run Leeds parkrun on my hen-do!). I was part of the parkrun family.

The reason I decided 2011 would be my year if running was because in a moment of madness I had entered the ballot for the VLM for the first time ever and guess what……………..in September 2010 I found out I’d got a place!