Have had my gorgeous daughter and her partner staying for five weeks and I have enjoyed a few lovely runs with her. We live somewhere which is geographically difficult to reach and today she was supposed to return home but couldn’t, due to weather complications. I decided to drag her out on a long run to ‘cheer her up’ and make the delay worthwhile. In my head I was thinking ‘at least 5K, maybe 5M, but I wouldn’t say not to 10M and how cool would a HM be’.
Anyway, we set off at a slow pace, with the gorgeous girl thinking that 10K would be more than enough, and just plodded through the kms… I didn’t fess up to her how far we had gone until we were over 7km and suggested we might try for 10miles. At this point she protested a fair amount but essentially was coping fine. We started sharing the stats after 13kms, and once we passed the 10M mark it was very much a joint effort to the HM distance with both of us feeling we could make it and wanting to succeed!
If someone had told me I could run for over 13 miles, and still feel I had a few kms in the tank when I started C25K on the 29th July last year, I’d have laughed at them. Even more unbelievable is the fact that I really enjoyed it. OK, we took 2h and 53 minutes and we could definitely have done it a few minutes faster, but this way we enjoyed every minute of it.
I hope I don’t suffer too much after this because my only long run prep was my monthly 10K last weekend, a 16.1k back in March and my regular 5ks mixed with occasional slightly longer runs. My daughter doesn’t run as regularly but often does long runs in the Peak District hills so was quite well prepared.
Added bonus - Strava says I’ve burned over 2000 calories…. Think we might need to feast royally tonight!
Happy running folks!
Written by
MJCAld
Half Marathon
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That’s brilliant! So, no training and no plan and off you go and just run a HM! I love your thinking 💪 It’s amazing what we can do if we just set off with no intention…
Well done to both of you. Such a special thing to do together and you’ve made lovely memories 😍
What a fabulous way to make the delay worthwhile! An unforgettable day. That's amazing progress over the space of a year too, I'm sure you feel incredibly proud and happy to have shared that with you daughter. Congratulations!!!
I certainly do, we have really enjoyed our extra day together, better than our original ‘last day’ yesterday when we were dreading the departure. Running is amazing 🤩 x
Thanks - love the emojis but we only looked like that after we had finished the official HM and ran down a hill doing ‘funny running’ to stretch our muscles out a bit. It was a bit of a nearly three hour shuffle for the rest of the time😂😂
Hey yes, what a positive twist. 😀 We nearly fell over the minute we stopped…. Funny how your muscles get used to one movement and can’t remember how to walk!
We sure did chew up the miles as we mattered away - we shared AirPods to start with - and discussed my appalling taste in music, then there were a couple of bouts of torrential rain, so we put them away and still found plenty to talk about!
I ran with my niece from time to time but she’s quit now 🙁. We did two races together, and had a few more planned, but she can’t sort her niggly knee/hip out unfortunately.
I hope your niece sorts out her niggles soon. I haven’t done any races yet and my daughter, who already has to catch a plane to come to see me, is about to emigrate to Canada, so we won’t be running together much for the foreseeable. My son is far too fast to run with me!
Oh that’s a shame 🙁. You’ll have to head over there soonest 😁
No-one else runs in my family except my lovely 7 year old great nephew. He’s done two junior local races, and he’s run alongside me for the final yards of my marathons since he was a sprog. When we get together we run about, and he makes me run, but he gets the bike! 😁 He’s had leg surgery this year but I’m hoping he’ll be up for my November marathon. He’s got a little brother so another one coming up on the rails 🙂
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