Finding My Inner Runner

I suspect it's not the actual running we're missing; since many of us can just go out and run when the mood takes us so long as we are fortunate with our health and the COVID-19 restrictions in our particular part of the world allow us to do so. It's possibly not even being able to run in a group; since as much as I enjoy the social side, I tend to be a solitary runner. For me, what I actually miss is being able to have something to judge my performance against. Not my overall position on the weekly email (although that has its own value), but the arcane calculation that is the age adjusted performance and how it varies from run to run. Then I discovered that Running Heroes has a weekly 5k challenge. OK, so it's on a Sunday rather than a Saturday, but it gives you a leader board and age tables and all of those little things that turn a run into a "non-competitive" competition. It's not really the same, but it is nice to feel that you are part of gro...

Actually, it was only meant to be 7 days, 4 runs and 40k, but, annoyingly, I got the start date of the challenge wrong and so the first 10k didn't actually count towards the challenge. I wasn't going to let that get in my way though, so today, with rather weary legs, and between the showers, I set off to complete the challenge and run the final 10k. Having had a quick recce earlier, the problematic riverside stretch that I ran on my first ever 10k turned out to be no longer submerged, so I decided to rerun that first 10k run from 1 July 2019. So, despite it being decidedly squelchy in places and my poor trails shoes having had another 350km on them in the intervening year, the difference between then and now was just over 15 minutes. Now, I think, I'm going to give my legs a couple of days off while I work out my next challenge.

. On 1 July 2019, I ran my  first ever non-stop 10k . I qualify the "non-stop" bit because several weeks earlier, before I'd even completed Couch to 5k, I'd covered just over 10k  refereeing a rugby 7s tournament . It was stop start, spread over six 14 minute games, but I still include it in my distance totals. Anyway, I digress; 1 July was the day I completed  Ju Ju's Magic 10k Plan  over on  Health Unlocked's Bridge to 10k Forum , so that's the day I'm counting. The time that evening was 1:19:36. Tonight, one year on and not including the rugby tournament mentioned above, I completed my 58 th run of 10k or more. When you consider the that 4 of those 58 runs were half-marathon distance, I've actually completed the 10k distance 62 times in the last 12 months. Tonight's time was 1:04:51, which is a bit off my PB of 58:58, but that wasn't what I was aiming for tonight given the conditions underfoot following several days of rainfall incl...