A slightly belated Happy New Year!
Over the Christmas & New Year period, my running has been non existent. This was due to a chest infection. This meant that I missed two cross-country events and various parkrun events as well. I was hoping to run Bromley parkrun on Christmas Day for the 3rd consecutive year. As fate would have it, the events was cancelled anyway due to flooding. In fact Bromley parkrun is currently postponed until the end of January.
Pilgrimage
This Saturday just gone I finally felt well enough to attempt a run. With no Bromley parkrun an alternative was needed. Jo a member of PWR had mentioned on Facebook that it was the 500th parkrun at Bushy Park near Hampton Court.
If you are unaware, Bushy Park is where parkrun started in October 2004.
So, Bushy Park is was. At 7.15am myself, Mich & Max left home, in the dark! picked up Jo and had a 70min drive over to Bushy Park.
The weather forecast was for blue skies after the month of biblical rain that we had endured and lo & behold as we got closer the clouds disappeared.
We arrived just around 8.30am and then followed the crowd and once people started gathering at the start line, a crowd it was; just shy of 1200 people!
Prior to the race there was the usual announcements from the Race Director and he mentioned that he knew people traveled from further afield to take part in the event. I was nodding contently, thinking yes, I have driven for over an hour to get here. He then followed the previous statement with "and one person has traveled up from Yeovil this morning" So that well and truly blew my journey out of the water.
The run was a delightful if (not surprisingly) a slightly muddy 1 lap tour around the Royal Park. I jogged round in 28 minutes. I have run over 60 parkruns now at over a dozen venues and the only reason I can is because of the volunteers. I honestly do not know how the volunteers there managed to process 1200 runners. But considering the numbers, there is very little waiting time to get your barcode scanned. Very impressive.
So the pilgrimage to the birth place of parkrun has now been achieved!
Back on Track
I must admit, that once I was given the news last year that due to my knee injury I would have to give up long distance running, I kind of lost my enthusiasm for running. I was only running the odd parkrun and was also eating and drinking far too much.
My enthusiasm was slightly re-kindled by taking part in a couple of cross-country runs. PWR are members of the Kent Fitness League which is a series of cross-country runs around Kent. After taking part in the first couple, I decided I wanted to complete everyone in the series. My chest infection soon blew that plan up in smoke.
Anyway, my lack of running and over-indulgence meant that that on 1st Jan this year, I was back up to 16st 7lb, only 10lb lighter than when I started training for the London Marathon 2.5 years ago. I had got myself down to 14st 3lb.
I am pretty pi**ed of with myself that I have let myself get so out of shape again. So it is back to running no more then 10k (except maybe on the odd occasion), back on the bike, back in the gym and back down the BMI ratings. I will be providing updates of my weight loss in my blogs. Today I am 16st.
Until the next time
TJH
