After his accident on the stairs, M was back on the run... and admitted to being nervous about it. Given a reasonably balmy 6 degrees at 9am, he was (imo) completely overdressed (3 layers including a rain jacket and hoody, plus a beanie under the raised hood, and gloves), but overdressed is the way that he prefers. In contrast, I was wearing two light layers plus gloves, which typically come off mid-run when I also like to roll back my sleeves and get air on my wrists.
Amazingly, M agreed to an unconventional route, which we approached throughout with a very gentle pace. We headed to the ‘destination’ park, discovering a new covid test marquee installation en route. This being just a few hours into Tier 4 restrictions and beautiful weather, the park was super-busy by the time we arrived. M didn’t like the crowdedness, especially around the ponds. Some runners were just ploughing their own furrows without trying to give other people a wide berth. Even ‘defensive’ running was quite tricky in places. We took to the quieter paths, decided not to run through a big obstructive puddle (just turned around and took another path) and then left the park entirely.
As if the dramatise the contrast, a normally nastily busy trunk road was still peaceful and easy to cross; in fact, we could have run along it (a did so for a hundred yards). We turned off onto a wide double avenue with a little strip of ‘woodland’ running down its centre. Here, people seemed much more courteous to one another. We then looped through some side streets to our second destination: the new sculpture to Mary Wollstonecraft that was in the news a fortnight or so ago. It is on a small historical green where she once taught, and when this whole area was still a series of villages and renown for religious and political dissent. The silvery aluminium of the sculpture was quite dramatic in the morning light. We debated to what extent the artist Maggie Hambling had been influenced by Rodin (my view) or by Pop Art (M’s), concluding that it was a bit of both. I should have taken a photo, but we were running along very nicely and it would have been wrong to interrupt the flow.
By the time we’d concluded our aesthetic judgment, we’d reached the ancient lane, once itself a main route between settlements, but now just a backwater with workshops and, increasingly, architects’ houses. I ran along part of this the other day, but now we did the fuller length. M decided to stop running along here, which was at about 4.3k/ 35 minutes - so he’d actually added a few minutes onto his previous longest run. I carried on in a sort of fartlek manner (new for me), running ahead to a target object and then back to meet M. I continued like this all the way through the back-snicket orchard and the mini-park, until the transition to walking (at which point the photo). I did 5k in 42 minutes, at a gentle pace of just over 8 mins/km for the most part.
I had gone out with a few things to experiment with during the run - little projects- such as full nasal breathing, hip lifting and upped cadence. Tbh, most of this went out of the window... at least as deliberate focus. There just was too much else to think about. Perhaps I was trying too many things at once. I did a bit of the nasal breathing on and off. It’s harder than I imagined, so ‘on and off’ was probably for the best; I recall that the second attempt felt easier than the first (and that the first effort was soon after the incline). I did periodic scans of my form and was very satisfied with my posture, landing and stride length. Of course, I did try some fartleks, which hadn’t been planned. Hurray for spontaneity! This might not be a disciplined practice, but at least I’ve now got some things to draw upon. And I need to remember that the main purpose of today’s run was to help M back out onto the road. He felt absolutely fine through the run itself, noticing the bruised ribs only during the post-run ITB stretch. A few hours on, he says he really knows he’s been out running (but that’s nothing to do with the injury).
Happy running!
week3run1 ✅. 3 x 17 mins with 1 min walks. 
How did your parkrun or (not)parkrun go?
