Chris Hobson
Well-Known Member
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 2
Parkrun revisited
Having commented on an earlier thread about the parkrun, I decided that maybe it is time that I started my own thread rather than going on about me me me on someone else's. Parkruns have been going since 2005 and have grown from a very small beginning to now being spread all over the UK and many other countries too. The format is a 5K run around a local park for runners of all abilities and none. The runs always take place at 09:00 on Saturday and are free of charge. In order to take part, all you have to do is go online to register and print out your barcode which you then need to take along to the run. The barcode is valid for any parkrun in the country, or it might be any in the world, I'm not sure. There is a briefing before the run for anyone who is new to the course and a general briefing about safety issues always takes place before the start. Nobody cares if you are slow or even if you can't run the whole course and have to walk some of it. Once you have completed the run you are given a token with another barcode on it which then represents your run time and position. This isn't quite as accurate as a chip time but is still pretty good. You then have your personal barcode and your token scanned by one of the volunteers and this ties you and your run time together. This makes it sound much more complicated than it is, it is quite straightforward really. Within an hour or two your time and position appears on the relevant parkrun website. The really brilliant thing about this is that, once you have done a few runs, you can go to the results page and click on your name and you are then taken to your own page with all of your previous results for that specific parkrun. This means that you can see how you have progressed since you started. After a while it starts to become a big deal every time that you score a personal best, known as your "PB". If you are starting out as an absolute beginner you are likely to be a bit rubbish to begin with but this means that you tend to score a PB quite regularly which is very encouraging. Once you have been doing the runs for a while you tend to get closer to the limits of your ability and the PBs then start to get a bit further apart. Once you start totting up lots of runs you can send off for a parkrun tee shirt every time you pass a relevant landmark. The tee shirts are free apart from the postage and you get one for doing 50, 100, 250, and 500 parkruns. You can find more info about parkruns on the UK parkrun website.
http://www.parkrun.org.uk/
Now for the me me me part. I did my first Parkrun at East Park in Hull in February 2014 at the age of 55, I had an attack of cramp in my left calf just short of the finish and had to hop over the line, my time was 30:32. I found the runs quite hard at first but, as I mentioned above, being a bit rubbish means that you tend to make fairly consistent progress to begin with. At first I was able to score one, two or sometimes even three new PBs every month. I peaked in August with a PB of 23:05. My times worsened again during the winter and I couldn't better that time until the following summer with a PB of 22:06. I now run fairly regularly at two different parkrun courses in Hull, sometimes at East Park but more often at the Humber Bridge Park. The East Park course is two laps around the boating lake on tarmac paths and is almost completely flat so it is the faster of the two courses. The Humber Bridge course is three laps of a woodland walk that involves much more basic paths. It undulates and often has a certain amount of mud so it is a little more challenging. My best time there had been stuck at 24:00 for quite a while. Early this March I have had a sudden unexpected improvement in 5K running form and scored a new PB at Humber bridge of 23:05 knocking nearly a minute off my previous best. A fortnight later on my 99th parkrun I did it again shaving off another 36 seconds to score 22:29. This prompted me to return to East Park to see if I could celebrate my 100th parkrun with a new PB there as well. I wasn't too sure how it would go as I wasn't sure that I could just put on a good performance on demand, it usually depends how I feel on the day. As it turned out I scored a new PB of 21:42 and came in 44th out of a field of 480. That means that at age 58 I was in the top 10% so I was pretty pleased with myself. I really can't recommend parkruns enough, they are a brilliant entry level event for budding runners to establish a fitness level to build on. Just two and a half years after doing my first parkrun I ran a marathon.
Having commented on an earlier thread about the parkrun, I decided that maybe it is time that I started my own thread rather than going on about me me me on someone else's. Parkruns have been going since 2005 and have grown from a very small beginning to now being spread all over the UK and many other countries too. The format is a 5K run around a local park for runners of all abilities and none. The runs always take place at 09:00 on Saturday and are free of charge. In order to take part, all you have to do is go online to register and print out your barcode which you then need to take along to the run. The barcode is valid for any parkrun in the country, or it might be any in the world, I'm not sure. There is a briefing before the run for anyone who is new to the course and a general briefing about safety issues always takes place before the start. Nobody cares if you are slow or even if you can't run the whole course and have to walk some of it. Once you have completed the run you are given a token with another barcode on it which then represents your run time and position. This isn't quite as accurate as a chip time but is still pretty good. You then have your personal barcode and your token scanned by one of the volunteers and this ties you and your run time together. This makes it sound much more complicated than it is, it is quite straightforward really. Within an hour or two your time and position appears on the relevant parkrun website. The really brilliant thing about this is that, once you have done a few runs, you can go to the results page and click on your name and you are then taken to your own page with all of your previous results for that specific parkrun. This means that you can see how you have progressed since you started. After a while it starts to become a big deal every time that you score a personal best, known as your "PB". If you are starting out as an absolute beginner you are likely to be a bit rubbish to begin with but this means that you tend to score a PB quite regularly which is very encouraging. Once you have been doing the runs for a while you tend to get closer to the limits of your ability and the PBs then start to get a bit further apart. Once you start totting up lots of runs you can send off for a parkrun tee shirt every time you pass a relevant landmark. The tee shirts are free apart from the postage and you get one for doing 50, 100, 250, and 500 parkruns. You can find more info about parkruns on the UK parkrun website.
http://www.parkrun.org.uk/
Now for the me me me part. I did my first Parkrun at East Park in Hull in February 2014 at the age of 55, I had an attack of cramp in my left calf just short of the finish and had to hop over the line, my time was 30:32. I found the runs quite hard at first but, as I mentioned above, being a bit rubbish means that you tend to make fairly consistent progress to begin with. At first I was able to score one, two or sometimes even three new PBs every month. I peaked in August with a PB of 23:05. My times worsened again during the winter and I couldn't better that time until the following summer with a PB of 22:06. I now run fairly regularly at two different parkrun courses in Hull, sometimes at East Park but more often at the Humber Bridge Park. The East Park course is two laps around the boating lake on tarmac paths and is almost completely flat so it is the faster of the two courses. The Humber Bridge course is three laps of a woodland walk that involves much more basic paths. It undulates and often has a certain amount of mud so it is a little more challenging. My best time there had been stuck at 24:00 for quite a while. Early this March I have had a sudden unexpected improvement in 5K running form and scored a new PB at Humber bridge of 23:05 knocking nearly a minute off my previous best. A fortnight later on my 99th parkrun I did it again shaving off another 36 seconds to score 22:29. This prompted me to return to East Park to see if I could celebrate my 100th parkrun with a new PB there as well. I wasn't too sure how it would go as I wasn't sure that I could just put on a good performance on demand, it usually depends how I feel on the day. As it turned out I scored a new PB of 21:42 and came in 44th out of a field of 480. That means that at age 58 I was in the top 10% so I was pretty pleased with myself. I really can't recommend parkruns enough, they are a brilliant entry level event for budding runners to establish a fitness level to build on. Just two and a half years after doing my first parkrun I ran a marathon.
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