Couch to 5k

Awesome

 

I attempted the Middleton Woods ParkRun route today. My absolute god, I was not ready for those hills AT ALL. I’d never even completed a 5k before (most was the 4.2k last Sunday) and that was not the place to do it for the first time! Will was in charge of the route and took a wrong turning which meant going up the most ridiculously steep and long hill completely unnecessarily. When we got to the end we’d gone 5.47k and it took us 47mins. I checked and we’d completed a 5k in just over 43mins. I did walk basically all of the hills after the first two though as it the third (that we didn’t even need to do!) was just too much and put me off them after that. Never again.

 

That's the worst one you could have chosen for Leeds parkrun hills!

I'm Run Director at Woodhouse Moor tomorrow, which is the one you want to avoid much climbing. We're potentially going to break our record attendance tomorrow!

 

There’s just so many at Woodhouse Moor though, I can’t imagine running along with literally hundreds of people doing the same route. I understand why this one only gets about 80 people though!!

 

It'll feel easier next time you do it. Just a bit, each time.

 

It's less intimidating than you might expect, especially as we have quite a few walkers taking over an hour, as well as those pushing 15 minutes at times. It's a big community event more than anything.

Armley is smaller scale and still flat. The others in Leeds have a few bumps in them.

 

Great advice from Chef Tyke - essentially autoregulation (more of which is here link)

“One out of 5 workouts is really good. One out of 5 is terrible. The other 3 are you just showing up.” – Dan John, Strength Coach

 

Any reason for expecting the record attendance?

 

Hills are just horrible, even for more experienced runners.
Oddly serious runners have a saying of ‘hills are your friends’ or ‘you need hills in your life’

 

None of my routes previously had any, just slight inclines, this was something else though. My legs are not happy with me.

 

Parkruns are ace. Definitely recommend getting involved.

 

Tourists chasing the parkrun number for their challenges - it's run #777 and we're one of the first parkruns to get that far. Last one to hit it had an increase of 200 runners from the previous week's total.

Sounds daft, but the unofficial parkrun challenges are really popular, to the extent that HQ have asked people not to do them, which looks like being predictably ignored.

Our record is 799 runners. We hit 756 a couple of weeks ago for our 'birthday' run. We'll see how popular tomorrow proves to be, but the only time we'll know for sure is when we see how many finish tokens are handed out.

 

Hopefully you will still be able to tackle the stairs tomorrow .

 

This was the birthday event photo taken before the start briefing that day. I expect to be standing in front of something similar in the morning.

 

Never realised that was a thing TBH. Recommended it to a club member who is attending tomorrow as they are in Leeds for weekend.

 

Crikey, one I Marshall for averages around 250 a week.

 

Some are quite fun - alphabet challenges based on the names of events, and stopwatch bingo where you try to get finish times with each of the 60 second digits over time. It's the ones that drive people to specific events that are the issue that parkrun are trying to avoid.

 

Ours varies with the student population, so we can vary by a few hundred depending on whether they're on holidays or not. There's at least 10 options in and around Leeds, but WHM tends to be the biggest, partly due to a central location and partly due to being one of the oldest parkrun venues.

 

I’ll be the person walking like John Wayne with a limp