Janathon Day 12: My first parkrun!

Since when did Saturdays begin at 7am, huh? Well, this one did. After Nici said on a previous blog post that one of her mini-Janathon challenges was to finally get to a parkrun, this reminded me that I’d kept meaning to get up (down? across? not sure…) to Whitstable which is the venue of my nearest one.

Whitstable, although only 30-40 minutes away by car, takes nearly two hours on the train and so I asked iliketocount if he would drive there and he said yes and, so, this morning, off to Whitstable we went.

It was great! I’d run the Folkestone Half the year before last and found out that coastal runs are pretty dull. But the Whitstable run had enough scenery going on to make things interesting and although it was mainly an out and back along the seafront, there was a muddy bit before looping back which broke it up a bit.

Coming back down to the finish though, I saw the runners ahead going up a hill at what appeared to be a 45 degree angle. NO ONE TOLD ME THERE WERE GOING TO BE HILLS! BASTARDS! I got to the bottom of the hill and it didn’t look too bad from there, it definitely didn’t look as bad as it did from the distance and I told myself that I could run up it, or at least stagger in a fashion not too far removed from running.

I made it to the top of the hill and looked at my Garmin: 34:08, which is mighty fast for me at the mo.

Stats
Distance: 5k
Time: 34:08
Pace: 11 m/m
Whitstable parkruns: 1