Hi! I'm back again!
I graduated a couple of years ago - went through the program without a hitch and loved it ... and then put my back out. It may have been a combination of being too ambitious at a Yoga class before my first (and only!) Parkrun, or the fact I was so elated at finshing that nearly ran into a post and pulled up sharply, but my back was agony for several months and I had to have physio. Then a combination of difficult circumstances (moving my mother to a care home, selling the house and clearing it out) led to a gradual decline in all the gains (lots of meals out and alcohol after a stressy day!) I had a couple of attempts to re-do C25K - my physio said do it on a treadmill to start with as it was kinder on the feet. But I didn't really like the treadmill, and the final straw was that the touch screen I used on one in the gym to slow down to walking pace malfunctioned and kept pumping the speed up, further each time till I was flat out, gasping and had to hit the emergency stop!
Then it's the usual thing of getting the motivation to start again.
The wake-up call was a blood test revealing high-ish blood sugar, and being told to go on the "healthier you" NHS diabetes prevention program.
So here I am, having just completed Week 4 Run 2 with Laura, and loving it again & wondering why the heck I didn't get back into it earlier! Lost a stone since March, but BMI is still 30.9 so a long way to go!
I've discovered a very good way of making the running phases pass, which shows what a complete nerd I am. The other day I was listening to an automated Spotify playlist, and came upon a song where Kate Bush was singing a sequence of numbers. I recognised immediately that she was singing the digits of the number pi in order! And when I noticed it wasn't at the start, it was about 15 digits in that I recognised her singing 32384626433 etc! I had learnt about 30 digits when I was in my teens, just for the sake of it and the sequence has never left me. The song is called "Pi" by Kate Bush, and was about a child who had a fascination for the digits of Pi - just like I did! She really does sing the digits beautifully, as if they meant something! Which of course they do, but not in the usual sense of a song lyric.
The song is a bit slow-paced for running, but I found today that if you recite the digits in your head, with a new one every fourth stride of e.g. the left foot, that it makes the time fly by! You end up reciting them quite slowly, but you have to concentrate - and that means you don't have time for your mind to wander and say "when's this torture going to end!"
Of course, you have to have the digits memorised, and I think I have a peculiar sort of mind where I can memorise long strings of digits (like my national insurance number, credit card number etc), but am hopeless at names!
Guess I'm going to have to memorize a whole bunch more for Week 5 Run 3 and onwards! I think the world record for memorising digits of pi is over 60,000.
No doubt you'll all think I'm really weird now!!! 
Week 4, Run 2
Week 4 Run 2
Week 4 Run 2
Week 4, Run 2
