Parkrun seems to be a particularly British way for nominally sane people of all ages to spend a Saturday morning. Since the first events in 2004 in Bushy Park in London this now global phenomenon has now grown to over 2000 events in 23 countries around the globe. The premise? anyone can register, turn up to any event with their own unique barcode and run or walk the 5 kilometre course as fast or as slowly as they can. It’s probably the most accessible timed running event in the world and according to the Parkrun official website over 2.5 MILLION people have finished a Parkrun with the average finishing time being just under 29 minutes. The fastest ever time being recorded in 2012 was a blistering 13:48 which is only just over a minute slower than the official 5000m world record set on a track.

I felt it was time to add my name to the list of finishers. Why? I hear practically nobody ask…. well I’m not really sure, it just seemed like a good idea at the time….. Well actually that’s a bit lame, let me try and explain my sudden desire to court pain and probable lower limb stress fractures.

You see I have this dead block of time in my 4 shift working cycle that’s know colloquially as a ‘swing day’ That looks bad typed out on a screen so I’d better explain…… Its not some sort of sordid swingers day where I hang out with sexual fetish obsessed people on the margins of polite society honest 😳. Like a lot of people who fettle airliners for a living on the flight line of an international airport I work a shift pattern of two 12 hour dayshifts followed straight away by two 12 hour nightshifts. The transitional day between the second dayshift and waiting to start the first of the nightshifts is called in the industry the ‘swing day’ and is kind of a dead spot in the working week. The first nightshift is always a killer as you’ve basically been up for a very long time by the close of play the next morning. You do get used to it, but it’s never easy. Over the years I’ve tried several strategies to cope with being awake and functional for almost 24 hours every week. Usually what I do is to stay up as late as possible after my second dayshift and then sleep in as long as I can before the first night. This can work well, but lately this approach has had its drawbacks. Firstly staying up late inevitably involves one or three more beers than is really advisable while watching some really terrible film on the TV. The result? well firstly these days I never get a really decent sleep as my almost 50 year old bladder has now taken to getting me up several times a night to remind me that I’m not 21 anymore and that I really shouldn’t have had that last beverage. Then there’s my living circumstances. As I’ve mentioned before (I think) when I’m at work in-between shifts I’m living on a narrowboat on the UK canal network, usually an idyllic and relaxing way to live, but with the summer the UK has been enjoying recently narrowboats (which are basically an insulated steel tube) get rather hot inside….. and over the last few weeks I’ve been basically ‘cooked’ out of bed by 10 or 11 am usually with a headache to boot due to the previous nights overindulgence 🤨

I needed a new approach, and I started to wonder if a mornings light exercise would both serve as a brake to the ‘just one more beer’ syndrome and tire me out enough to encourage a decent afternoon nap before trundling off to work.

Cycling of course was the obvious solution but there were drawbacks, namely space. I just haven’t got the room on my 40ft narrowboat to keep a bike and the associated kit. I could keep it on the roof, but : 1/ it would get wet and rusty , and 2/ it would probably get nicked. I’ve tried to fit a bike inside the boat, and recently after purchasing a classic British machine with ridiculously small wheels I did think I’d cracked the perfect ‘bike on the boat’ conundrum, unfortunately this proved to be an entertaining but false dawn but that’s for another time (watch this space, it’s an epic tale of eBay, overspending, lack of research coming back to bite me etc, you won’t want to miss it 😂)

Running however needs no kit apart from a pair of trainers and some vaguely suitable exercise attire, so I started to wonder if a light morning run along the towpath of the canal would tick the exercise box, so I started to pack my trainers in my bag when I left home for my 4 days on the boat / at work. Then after my 4 days away I unpacked the unused trainers again when I got home. My intentions were good honest, but somehow I just never seemed to follow through on them. The excuses were legion, it might rain, its a bit too hot, I’ll go later after I’ve had some lunch, oh look another episode of Escape to the Country on the TV…….. what I needed was a clear motivational push to get my lazy butt out of the boats hatch, and that’s when I started to toy with the idea of attending the local Parkrun.

The next weeks swing shift was a Saturday and a little light internet research confirmed that there was indeed a Parkrun just 10 minutes drive from where I moor the boat. I’ll just register and see how I feel on the day I thought. then I made the fatal mistake of mentioning my tentative plan to the family. I was slightly taken aback with the depth of what a good idea they all thought it was, the kids obviously smelt a decent chance of parental ridicule and my wife possibly envisioned me returning to the slightly less cuddly figure of yesteryear. This sense of family expectation did seem to tip the balance none the less and come Saturday morning I found myself in the car armed with a Mars Bar and a bottle of Lucozade Sport on the way to the local park. I wasn’t fully committed at this point, I figured I’d just pitch up, check out the course and my fellow Park Runners and if it all looked a bit full on and serious I’d just melt away into the background and tell the family I’d twisted my ankle getting out of bed.

Anyway, the full story of what happens next really deserves its own post so I’ll leave it there for now…… tune in next time for a torrid tale of over reaching and over ambitious athletic under achievement 😳