It was another sunny lunchtime for a freedom parkrun, if maybe a little on the chilly side. No, I have to admit, it was actually very cold. Certainly hat, coat and gloves weather for anything other than running.
Wrapped up nice and warm, with three layers on top, running tights on the bottom and even a set of gloves, I never actually felt the cold. Even though I know it can only have been 1C at most. Andy (my brother) and I made it our 4th freedom run together in the last 10 days. Our aims for today were a nice gentle run so as to save all our energy and our ageing limbs for the main parkrun event tomorrow morning. We agreed on a warm up lap of the park and a rough aim of 25 to 27 minutes for the freedom run itself. But not really meaning for that to be a target.
We set off at a very steady pace, comfortable enough to talk about our plans for the weekend the whole way round. This weekend we have our mates from "back home" (Kent) coming to stay at Andy's. One of the events for the weekend being tomorrow's parkrun. We kept our eyes on the times at our various normal time check-points around the first lap and knew we were on for somewhere around our original aim. Anyway, talking remained comfortable and to our surprise we completed the first lap in a couple of seconds over 12 minutes. So in fact 24 minutes was likely to be pretty comfortable.
Being competitive as we are, we immediately adjusted our aims and assured each other that over 24 minutes would no longer be acceptable. What are we like!
During the second half of the run we also discussed a way to come up with a handicap system for us and our mate Mike (who is running parkrun with us tomorrow). We settled on target times of 18:30 for me, 19:30 for Andy and 24 minutes for Mike (as this was going to be a comfortable time for us today). Based on the fact that we are bound to have a few beers tonight, and we all know alcohol impairs performance (didn't you know?), we also agreed on a beer allowance. Each beer consumed this evening adds 15 seconds to our target times for tomorrow (or 20 seconds for Mike). Therefore, I am happy in the knowledge that 6 beers tonight buys me an extra 90 seconds for tomorrows parkrun. Well worth it!
Anyway, we had nearly finished by the time that discussion was over and a little burst at the end of our run saw us home just inside 24 minutes at 23:58. My second slowest, but still very pleasing.
That's 17 freedom runs for me now and I'm already looking forward to numbers 18 and 19 next week. With that in mind, I'm likely to have run more freedom runs than parkruns at some point within the next few weeks. There can't be many people out there that have run more freedom runs than parkruns!
I'll post an update about tomorrow's "beer handicap" parkrun on Sunday probably.
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