Trying something a bit different

[sTrongFuse]

So, with Storm Dennis heading in my general direction, but not yet making a menace of himself, I decided to head out along the coast to Dunbar to make Lochend Woods the venue for parkrun #15. It was grey, it was a bit damp, but the winds had still to pick up and, all in all, it wasn't too bad a morning for me and the 55 other runners who headed out.

I decided, today, to do something a bit different. Usually, I just go out and run, and see how it goes, but today I thought I'd try and work a little on my speed. The Lochend Woods route is one of the flatter routes near me, so it fitted with my experiment.

I'd taken the various weekly programmes of W1 - W4 of the Couch to 5k programme and turned them into workouts. Instead of walking and running, the idea was that I would comfortably jog what had been the walking elements, and then pick up the tempo for the running sections. I'm not actually all that bothered about my pace, but I thought it might be interesting to put some intervals back into my running (never did I think I would ever say those words). This week, I chose the W1 version, with a 5 minute warm-up jog, 8 x 1 minute higher tempo sections, 7 x 1.5 minute easy recovery sections and a final 5 minute easy cool down section that should, in theory, get me close to the finish.

It didn't quite work out that way.

The wheels came off at about 22 minutes and I had walk the recovery section. Clearly if I'm going to do this, I need to temper the tempo bits, but lesson learned.

Annoyingly, my "workout" ended when I was still about 0.5k from the finish, so I don't have my own time for the route. The official time from the results page was 30:32 so, while not my fastest parkrun, it was a PB on that particular course and, despite walking for ~90 seconds, I knocked 58 seconds of my previous PB on that route.

So, all in all, it worked out pretty well, I just need to find a happier medium between the tempo and the easy segments.

[Buddy34 Graduate]

It's great to try new things when running and it did work as you got a new pb for that course. Congratulations 🥳

[AlMorr Ambassador Graduate]

It's the old story of "trial and error" you did very well this morning, 56 running at a parkrun is very small, think Bushypark is over a 1000 every week, but with that number you will get to know more runners.

Well done on running 58 seconds less than your previous run on that course.

[sTrongFuse Graduate in reply to AlMorr]

Dunbar isn't a particularly well supported run unfortunately. It's fairly new (less than a year old) and its remoteness works against it. Also doesn't help that it has four more established ones at Vogrie, Meadowmill, Portobello and Edinburgh all within about 20 minutes drive.

It's average number of runners is less than 100/week, so I've taken to trying to support it rather than my local one at Vogrie. It also has the advantage that the track loops around one of the rugby clubs, so if I'm assigned to a game at Dunbar, it's one of the few occasions I can do both parkrun and rugby as the parkrun finish line is next to the pitch.

[AlMorr Ambassador Graduate in reply to sTrongFuse]

There is a YouTube video of that parkrun, it's at

"Lochend Woods #49 Scottish Parkruns" (7.39)

[Granspeed Graduate]

I tried this same thing one day last week. And with much the same result! (Though slower, don’t get me wrong...🐢) Very hard to get the pace right to produce a productive balance. 🤔 Going to try it again and use a pacing mechanism of some kind to try to get Faster not to be Too Fast - that steady build up is what I’m after. 😊👍

[sTrongFuse Graduate in reply to Granspeed]

Kind of the same here. I'm not actually all that fussed about my speed, but having hit all my distance targets, I'm now attempting to slowly chip away at my various PBs. My goals are an hour for 10k, 1 hour 45 for 10 miles, and 2 hours 30 for HM. I need to improve by 3 minutes 39, 4 minutes 29 and 23 seconds respectively.

[sTrongFuse Graduate]

I've just discovered that the average time for that course is 30:29, so I now have a target to aim at next time I'm there...

[Sarakc Graduate]

Lochend woods is my local parkrun! Only done it a few times as unfortunately I work on Saturdays! Looking forward to doing it again sometime soon! (I’ll be doing my usual walk/run and 30 mins is my average time.)

[sTrongFuse Graduate in reply to Sarakc]

Vogrie and Meadowmill are both closer to me, but I tend to rotate between the three and an occasional visit to Portobello.