Parkrun!

 

Holy cow! It's been a while.

I started doing little bits of running right at the end of September and have been playing it all by ear. Road runs felt worse than grass runs, so most of the runs have been on grass, up Arthur's Seat. I've been running 3 times a week at most and 5 miles at a time at most - at first the runs were more like half walking half running.

Then the 2nd week of October we both got Covid and I took two weeks completely off running. There's a spaciousness about having been away from running for so long because it's not like I'm scrambling to retain fitness - I'm starting from scratch so what's another week or 2's wait? It didn't really bother me.

My lungs have been irritable ever since and so I've not been pushing. At first my legs felt quite dead, but I'm slowly gaining a bit more spring. According to things I've been reading, as an older lady runner what I should be concentrating on is lifting heavy weights, doing HIIT and sprint sessions, and doing plyometrics. The trouble is when everything's held together with rubber bands and glue you're reluctant to bounce around too much.

I don't really know how to lift weights. I'm toying with doing a course at the Pleasance in January - which would mean getting up early on a Sunday morning to go - we'll see.

Plyometrics, flyometrics. We're not ready for that yet - springing, jumping, bounding and all that. Well actually I can bound a bit. Sometimes I do :-)

And intervals. I like intervals! I've been doing the odd test of speed, nothing as structured as an interval session. I do intervals indoors on my bike.

On top of this I've been trying to eat more protein - it's really not easy. The vegans say there's plenty protein in plants but when you look at the numbers there really isn't. What I'm going on is - again - advice to your older lady runner - we have more trouble maintaining and building muscle so we need to keep the numbers up - or that's what I'm giving a try at the moment anyway.

Lastly, well not lastly but even I'm getting bored, so I'm thinking about you - but another thing I'm trying which is most disgusting, is drinking fishy collagen powder because we lose collagen as we age and apparently it might help my body to repair skin, tendons, connective tissue. Seems worth a try - but honestly, two teaspoons of fishy powder in a glass of water - gag-tastic. I feel like Elizabeth Bathory drinking the blood of virgins to stay young. Fish virgins. You can get beefy collagen as well but I'm scared of mad cow disease.. If anyone out there said "too late", congratulations, you made an obvious joke.

So anyway, what I really wanted to say was that I went and did a parkrun today. It just sort of hatched as an idea. I've been going a run at the same time as parkrun these last few weeks because then Peter and I are both as knackered as each other for the rest of Saturday. This morning I had the notion that maybe I should just run the parkrun. It was bucketing down when we got up and so an off-road run wasn't all that appealing. Arthur's Seat has been very squidgy. I didn't think it was likely and I didn't tell Peter but I took my card with me just in case.

I had a good sized warm up and I didn't feel too bad so I went and stood a bit further back than usual at the start. The first mile was the trickiest because it's really congested towards the back and the last thing I wanted to do was a lot of braking and dodging around. Hell for knees.

But the field spread out and it was nice to not have that much pressure.

Running up hill on tarmac still feels a bit awkward on my knee, and steep downhill also needs adjustment - I was definitely compensating with my left leg - but the rest of the time I was running quite relaxed, and I don't think I made anything worse.

Getting to the bottom of the long descent feels like hell as they turn the gravity up to full again. 

Looking at my Garmin I could see that sub-30 mins was still a possibility so I tried not to slow down. I got in just a handful of seconds under it.

Hurray! First parkrun since February. All those months of not being able to run! 

So it was my worst time ever today and I got a right soaking but I was 3rd in my age category and I'm delighted to get round.