Wednesday 26 August 2015

Me and running (Part 1 of....well, I'm not sure!)

Intro
I've been writing this blog in my head for ages now, pretty much when I'm running and need to take my mind off the running and remember the reasons that I am running for!  But I hadn't written anything down and so for the last 2 weeks I've been trying to!  This has been a bit of a long process, hence the reason I haven't posted anything since my 1st blog.  Thing is I had to write this for me.  I've been struggling with my training.  I haven't told anyone but I picked up a slight injury at the start of my marathon training and lost all motivation.  It's amazing how much a small injury can hinder you and set you back enough to cause a mild panic and lack of motivation.  Anyway, I needed to write this to remember why I run and where my motivation has been coming from lately.
So in order to get something posted regularly I'm splitting this one into 2 or 3 parts, otherwise I'll never get anything online!!  Hope it's worth the wait, but to be fair, this one is mainly for me!

A few weeks ago I ran my 50th Parkrun*.

Now to some of you who don't know what a Parkrun is this may mean nothing to you (visit http://www.parkrun.org.uk/ to find out more and you never know you might want to start!) and to those of you who do know what one is it still may not mean anything to you!

But to me it meant a lot.

It meant I had persevered at something.  That I had accomplished a goal that I had set for myself.  It allowed me to met new people, make new friends.  It took me to parks and places I would never have gone to otherwise.  It gave me a reason to get off my backside on a Saturday morning and go somewhere!!

And I had a good time!  The planning of my little trips, the anticipation, the anxiety......all the feelings that come with new experiences, of going to new places, meeting new people.  I looked forward to my next Parkrun!

It also meant that I had improved on something.  Quite considerably......

I started running about 7 years ago.  I've always played sport and kept fit (-ish!!) but have never been a runner.  Yes, I've done the odd mile or two as part of team training but that was about it.  Nothing substantial or regular.  I'm not sure of the exact date I started but I do remember, what I class as, my 1st run.

A friend** of mine from work, we'll call him Brian, asked if I wanted to join him for a run after work one day.  I put him off fearing failure and looking like an idiot, until eventually I agreed.  So, one day after work we headed out from the car park for a 2-3 mile jog around Colwick Park.  The main reason I remember this event so well is because of something Brian said when I was huffing and puffing and felt like dying after about a mile and a half.

He told me to not stop.

If I had to walk then walk.  Even better would be to jog really slowly, which he did while I walked and caught my breathe***.  But basically don't stop moving.  And that was that.  We finished the run, this became one of my goals for every run I do and my "love" of running was born :-)

After that I carried on going for the odd run, nothing major, just running.  Brian kept suggesting that I run the Robin Hood Half Marathon sometime.  "Half marathon?", I would say, "are you mad?  That's like a million miles!".  After a while I started to think why not?  I could run 6 miles why not double that?  So I entered the 2011 Robin Hood Half Marathon.

And ran it (please see a previous post http://boreoffsharif.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/my-robin-hood-half-marathon.html about how it went!).

Not long after that, my mate Brian suggested that I sign up for Parkrun.  Which I did (I'm starting to think that I'm a bit too influenced by my mate Brian!).  So I ran my first Parkrun on 26th November 2011.  I came 92 out of 132 in a time of 30:46.  Nothing spectacular but a start.

And so I kept jogging, doing Parkruns, another Half Marathon, jogging......just plodding along.  I started getting a bit disheartened by the fact I wasn't improving in anyway.

Then I attended a talk by Dave Sunderland+,a GB running coach, in February 2013 and my whole outlook on running and training changed.  I realise that this is quite a grand statement but it really was true.  What he spoke about, from diet to running style, made me open my eyes to what I had been doing up to that point and how I could progress going forward.  It was the reason I changed how I approached training, about what I ate before runs and, most dramatically, my running style(there's a whole blog post to be written about that and the initial, disastrous results of that!  For a brief insight check out the blog I started writing while training for 2013 marathon, especially the post from the day I got a stress fracture but didn't realise!).  

This may sound strange after the last paragraph, but things went horribly wrong after this!  I picked up injury after injury, continued to run through them , got disheartened again (even more so now as I knew what I needed to do to improve) and eventually decided I needed to rest (turns out over the course of 18 months I had 2 separate stress fractures in my right tibia which weren't diagnosed until they had nearly healed!).

So, because I wasn't running, I decided I should still try and be involved in running and so I volunteered as much as I could at Parkrun.  And I had a great time!

And because I volunteered a bit more it meant I got to meet, and get to know better, the amazing family that I will call the Merrymen.........but more about them in Part 2 :-)


Quick note: I'm going to try and not use real names in my blogs.  It makes it more fun for people to try and recognise themselves and also saves their embarrassment!  Also I think I may add an intro from time to time after I've completed writing the post.  A postscript I guess but at the start (prologue? Who knows, I never got my head around English stuff!!)

*I tried to comment on the last 15 or so runs on Twitter and Facebook using the #TourTo50Parkruns hashtag
**I say friend but there are times that I curse the bastard for getting me into this running thing ;-)
***I was a smoker then.  I ran out of breathe a lot!  I stopped smoking about a year later.  It meant I didn't have to train harder just because I smoked!!!
+ This is the only real name I'm using in this post.  A year after this talk Dave unfortunately passed away.  I only met him once, and that was in a crowd, and had one email in reply to my thank you email to him, but he had a massive influence on how I look at running.  I know I'm no elite athlete but it mattered to me.  I was very sorry to here of his passing.



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