Looks like I’ve inspired my youngest son to get prepared for the school fun run!

Every week I turn up to Parkrun and get ever so slightly faster. This time I’ve found a feature on my Apple Watch that gives you alerts if you’re “off pace”, so I set it at 4.30 and then was “off pace” for basically the whole race. Not exactly the motivating experience I was hoping for! 😆

Plus, I was trying to be evenly paced throughout, but 4.30 is still too fast for me to maintain for the whole distance. I find it helpful to have other folks around and try to stick with their pace, but at a certain point that heavy legs feeling kicks in and I start slowing down. I’ve bought myself some lighter shoes - I wonder if that will have any effect?

Anyway, fastest one yet - 22.30! Nearly at 22! ⚡️

I had some excess adrenaline floating around after a frustrating meeting at work. So I decided to do my long run. I’m finding running is super helpful for my mental health and thinking through things.

So I’m back, feeling more stoic and hopefully I can get on with the work I actually need to do today now! 🙄

There were lots of pedestrians around so I felt like I was back in a bad reconstruction of 90s video game classic Wipeout at some points. Except fewer lasers. Someone needs to invent an AR running game for sure. 😁

I’ve signed up to the 10km London Winter Run. I think I’ve recruited Jon. Anyone else up for it? Sunday 9th Feb - https://www.londonwinterrun.co.uk/

To prepare, I’m following Tom’s sage advice and doing some intervals. Today it was 5 minutes warm up, and then 4x800 with a walk or jog to recover in between. To keep track of the distances I’ve bought the Interval Pro app that has an Apple Watch app too, plus audio updates. Super helpful.

Anyway - looks a bit slow on average but I’m more puffed out than the stats here seem to show!

Phew! Fastest one yet at about four different distances. I really felt that “leaden legs” thing on the last lap but kept pushing.

Is it normal for your toes to go numb?! 🙀

In other news, I’ve been using a new Withings scale to track my weight. Somehow I seem to have gone through Christmas, enjoyed all the lovely food and still lost some weight! 🎉

Phew! Jogged up the hill from Peckham Rye to get there just in time to do a second Parkrun. 😱

It was busy! Not quite as crammed together as Peckham was though. That felt a bit dangerous at times.

Thankfully my plan of not smashing it on the first one seems to have paid off. I was a bit slower than the first one, but not that much. And I had energy all the way round.

I’m super pleased to start the year doing something positive like this.

Good to see some friendly faces too. Cheers for the encouragement everyone and happy new year!