Photo pinched from Sweatshop Edinburgh. Thanks v. much.
Saturday I finally went out there and did it. A parkrun. A Porty Parkrun. So now I have laid down my championship challenge time! I had a few goals for this. I've had a dicky tummy, so to be frank, number one goal (no, not number two) was to not poop my pants. My second goal was to see if I could get under 24 minutes. Surely I could do that? Number three goal was to see if I could beat the other over 50 Porty lady there...Fen, who passed me in the last desperate 200m of the Prom race just over a month ago. But not at the expense of missing out on number one goal. That was really my primary objective.
I was not relishing the prospect at all. Peter kind of talked me down in the car and got me thinking about speed and not going off too fast and all that kind of thing. It's 3 laps of the same course, which I actually quite liked. It helped me break it all down.
It was very well organised but seems to be much too popular. I was unimpressed to be starting at a walking pace until the crowd could shuffle to a jog and then a run. At least there was plenty of wind cover, particularly for the first lap. By the second lap things were spacing out and it was more roomy.
I had the usual problems. What do I think about? Don't think, it slows you down. You just have to kind of give your body the idea that it's an emergency and then switch off your brain. But not so much of an emergency that you poop your pants.
I was onto the last lap sooner than I thought and I did get kind of lost in it all. Before I knew it I could see that I was near the finish. I picked the pace up just in case Fen was right on my shoulder. I didn't know where she was. I haven't run myself into that kind of oblivion in quite some time and I had to take some time afterwards before I could speak or do much. But I discovered I'd ticked all three boxes. Fen came in a little behind me. I'd run 23.47. My pants were still clean. A Hollywood ending,
It was only later, browsing through old results, that I realised that I'd run a PW for the parkrun by quite some distance (time). And yet I was quite untroubled. Perhaps I am finally learning my lesson. Don't let what you could do in the past spoil what you can do today!
Today, in the morning, neither of us were walking that well. Just shambling around. I wanted to run 13 or 14 miles around Gullane and surrounds and Peter didn't have any objection so that's what we did. I've been enjoying getting up in the hills but I really liked getting back down to the beach today.
There were some cracking God Skies. I may have slightly tweaked the saturation and contrast. I'm sorry. I couldn't help myself.
We had a toilet stop at Gullane and when I came out, the sun had come out and I was confronted by a burning bush!!!
I waited around in case there were any instructions forthcoming, but there was nothing to hear but the blackbirds and the odd crow.
Back at Yellowcraigs it was nearing dusk and the crows were cawing raucously in the trees. I picked up the pace in case, err, well Dracula and all that. Probably lives in Dirleton.
We arrived back at the car, with 13 miles on the clock, hungry and tired.
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