South Manchester Parkrun - Happy 2013!

After staying out last night rather later than I intended (although tee-total as I was driving) and having only had about 5 hours sleep, I woke up this morning coughing and choking so much that Grandad wondered if I wanted to run at all.  However, I was actually feeling relatively fine, and we got ourselves out to the Platt Fields Park for the New Year Parkrun.

The course loops around the park several times, so although you cover a lot of the same ground twice, it's not actually a lapping course: I'm sure this suits many, but I found I was looking at my watch a lot more than I'd have liked to, just to check how far into the race I was.

I warmed up with Grandad - one lap of the lake and a bit - and managed to keep up with his rather faster pace (his jog is about my race pace). So I hatched a cunning plan ... I asked him to run with me for the first few hundred yards at his jog pace, to get it into my legs, and then told him to bugger off and do his own run afterwards (so as not to slow him down too much).  My plan was to try and keep up the faster pace for the first mile, and hopefully not drop too far back in the second two (although of course I only had my watch to help me).

I knew that I needed to keep around 9:38 min/mile to get my sub-30 target, and my first mile (which was quite hard going) turned out to be 8:45! I knew there was no way I could keep that up the whole way round but hoped I could at least give myself a couple of good miles to allow me to drop back a bit at the end if I needed to. The loopy course was a tad depressing but the volunteers were amazing -especially as they'd come out on NYD.

We had been warned that there were some 'deepish puddles' on the route, but not to try and run around them because of some rather deep drainage ditch. Deepish was an understatement.  There was one puddle at about 2.5 miles that was shin deep on me! Now I know how Jesus felt ...

Was also nice that a lot of runners had hung around the finish to cheer the last people through on (although for once I was about 1/3 way down the field).  Grandad was also there with his camera (hence pic already) to snap me as I crossed the line - but there were also two official photographers.

Of course the BIG question is ... did I break 30 mins? Well ...

Grandad's Pic

I did it! I did it!! I did it!!!

Not only did I do it but I frelling SMASHED it! Official time (well impressed they're out already ... kudos to the parkrun team) is 29:12 :D Grandad even said he thought it was a rather slow course, and he was 15 seconds slower than Saturday even though he had to re-do his shoe-lace at Congleton.  That's another 98 seconds off from Congleton and a total of 192 seconds off my PB over our parkrun challenge.  Ratherproud.com.

[Update: forgot the stats from Garmin site: split 8.45, 9.36, 9.34, 8.22 (for the last few yards)]

Yesterday I also set my goals for 2013:

* Reduce weight to 8 st 13 lb (in the next 3 months)

* Get down to a 28 min parkrun - 9 min miles

* Get a 50% age grade or more (a)

* Run 500 miles over the year (I may up this ...)

* VLM time breaking 5 hours - GRG at the moment predicts 5:08

(a) As I've already got my age grade over 50% (nearly 51 this morning) I think I might revise that to 55% ...