There I was, waiting slightly apprehensively in a little coffee shop hidden round the back of the Barbican Centre. This was to be a first meeting of two of the founding members of the Retro Runners.
Every time the door opened I looked up to check if whoever was coming in could be the runner from this C25K forum (when your avatar resembles a ceramic chicken it’s hard to know what you will look like in real life):
woman with bag on wheels closely followed by henpecked husband 🤔, not you,
young woman in athleisure wear, 🤔, not you,
trendy couple clutching one another’s hands, 🤔, nah
After several comings and goings I noticed a lone person come in and look around the shop. “Jan..?” I mouthed, wondering if I should actually use her full name Hidden , or whether I was making overtures to a complete stranger! She certainly didn’t resemble any kind of farmyard fowl, pottery or other.
It seems crazy that you’d meet up with someone who you only knew from her blogs about running in Italy, but it was an entertaining afternoon chatting about all things running: faffing, breathing, Laura’s excruciating expectations (Speed Podcast), trials of Parkrun, the overheating issues that come with the territory of being a woman of a certain age, and much more beside. I just hope our guffaws didn’t irritate the “young people”. Although they were probably more irritated that we were given the only two PCTs in the establishment (Portuguese Custard Tarts) which Jan had reserved earlier in the day. 👍🏽
A nice way to spend an afternoon.
Retro Runners - Birthday Number Ones Released
Jostling with the January Joggers
