Five Fails

Let me begin with the negatives of today’s run, and there were a few.

Fail number one: when I got out the house, half an hour later than I wanted but still in time to run to Parkrun, the first two miles seemed not to have registered on my Runkeeper app. I had to stop it, scrap that run and start again. I did check the time and where I’d got to, however, because every mile counts when you’re on the running club 1000 mile in a year challenge.

Fail number two: I got hopelessly lost after not turning right on Rose Mount from Storeton Road. This added a mile or so to my distance and made it far too late for me to start Parkrun.

Fail number three: Having finally got to the park and deciding to do a couple of mini loops away from the Parkrun throng in the lower part of the park, my headphones gave out as I’d forgotten to charge them. So it was just me and the sound of the rain, and the odd dog bark.

Fail number three point five: Did I mention that it was raining? Virtually all the way around.

Fail number four: My belt, holding my water and phone etc. started to fall apart. Well that is not strictly true. It started to fall apart many months ago and the phone pocket was being held together by a safety pin. This safety pin was now dangling uselessly but was stuck in a piece of thread that took five minutes for me to decide that I couldn’t resolve it. A last minute brainwave saw me take my, now redundant, parkrun wristband and wrap it around the pocket so that it wouldn’t keep banging on my thigh and threaten to break off completely.

Fail number five: Even after adding on the miles for the section that my app didn’t register, I didn’t even make it to 14 miles, never mind the 16 or 17 which is what I had hoped to do.

A veritable catalogue of mini disasters which on a normal day would have sent me spinning off into a huff. But surprisingly, not today. I guess, because I was just so pleased with myself for getting out there in the first place when the weather was so drippy, that the rest, really didn’t seem to matter, after the first few seconds of annoyance.

It had been a tussle as to whether I was doing the long run yesterday or today. Both looked rubbish on the forecast, but in reality, the Friday had turned out better. I chose today though, because I could still feel the effort of Wednesday’s race in my legs. I’d pulled out a speed over those 5 miles that hadn’t been there since 2015, and it had felt tough but great. It was a six minute improvement over last year’s effort, from 51:10 to 45:10, and that was very satisfying.

So, I’m not surprised that I took two days to get running again. And once I got going, I was kept pleasantly cool by that rain today.