Riddlesdown parkrun nineteen (rdp19)

The week's training would have been better if I hadn't got ahead of myself and done a 17k long run the day after a tempo run. Result - The hamstring problem had gone in the wrong direction and felt worse than it did a week earlier.

I'm trying to learn from it. Let's not talk about it anymore.

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So, on to Riddlesdown parkrun nineteen.

In the days leading up to the parkrun the BBC weather had been forecasting heavy rain. This had me extremely excited and the tweets were flying around with suggestions around clothing and footwear choices. There was also talk of how many people were hardcore enough to turn out for the run in heavy rain.

Then on Friday night the BBC changed their forecast from their random guesswork into a real one based on fact. This turned out to be spot on.

We arrived and found Terry waiting in the car park, and continued over to the downs where we were confronted with very poor visibility due to the fog (A dense layer of cloud lying close to the surface of the ground or water and reducing visibility to less than 1 km (0.62 mi). Fog occurs when the air temperature becomes identical, or nearly identical, to the dew point.).

the fog had us reaching for our brightest running gear (photo: Iain Morton)

Then something unusual happened. The wife announced that she had her running kit on underneath her jeans and was going to run the course instead of taking photos or marshaling. All we had to do was find someone that would look after Lime until one of us had finished.

We had a warmup jog over to the start line. Nicki (race director) had already started her pre-race speech before we arrived so we joined the back of the crowd of runners. Once there Lucy (volunteer extraordinaire) spotted that we were both dressed in our running gear and offered to look after Lime.

The baba must have wondered what was happening as both the mummy and the papa ran off and disappeared into the fog.

I went ahead with Terry in search of a pb he thought he had seen lying around, while the wife eased into her first parkrun with a run/walk strategy.

(photo: Iain Morton)

Halfway around and I spotted Lime, who was quite content, and now with Nicki. I slowed down to make sure all was ok, and it was.

I continued around with Terry until 4.5km where I edged slightly in front to let him concentrate on his final push for a new pb.

nicki and lime (photo: Iain Morton)

I crossed the finish line, I wasn't racing so wasn't overly concerned about my finishing time. Lime had made it onto Nicki's shoulders by this point and still looked happy.

Terry came in a few seconds after me, knocking over a minute off his previous pb! Not bad considering there was a lot of conversation taking place during the run.

I had left my barcode in the car so had to dash off to find it. While I was doing that Terry had gone back to find the wife and accompanied her along the last stretch of the course.

Dani unleashing the fury on the final straight (photo: Iain Morton or Nicki Clark)

She crossed the line in 36:23. Not bad when you consider she has done absolutely no training. Hopefully she has got the bug and will continue to put in regular appearances at future parkruns. (Only 49 more and you'll earn that t-shirt!)

All runners safely home, we relocated ourselves to the good companions pub for the usual tea, coffee and bananas. Plus, because we (team7t) had been present at all of October's events there were mars bars courtesy of Nicki.

team7t (photo: Nicki Clark)

Thanks to Lucy and Nicki for looking after Lime during the run. Thanks for the mars bars and thanks for the photos. Thanks to everyone else that entertained Lime during the course of the morning. Thanks for everything else that I haven't said thanks for. :-)

7t