Mile One - "Letting It Loose"

Set myself up in the front and like all parkruns they just basically say "ready set go" kind of surprising everyone. LOL My daughter sprinted out quickly to keep out of traffic, I held back a bit but no issues getting up to speed and settling into pace. Breathing is kind of labored but settled down and finished the slightly net downhill mile in 7:48 feeling strong. Didn't catch up to my daughter until about 3/4 mile in.

Mile Two - "I Remembered It Right, This Part Sucks"

Mile two starts with a climb so I burned some matches here then tried hard to stride out the downhill...holding like 8:20 on this mile so far to the turnaround, which I walked a little. Back up in the hill this time not pushing quite as hard, then stride out the downhill as we pass the 2 mile mark 8:28 split. It's really warm out and I'm starting to lose my oomph and focus. One mile plus to go - hang on dude.

Mile 3 and The Kick - "Hanging On Then The Crash"

I'm holding about 8:45 for the first half of the third mile, then we get to one more false flat hill and I push the effort a little and my body is not digging it. This is where my lack of running for almost ten years gets me still, but I did better than last time.

The MUP is busy as usual and with about 0.4 miles left I wind up too close to the edge of the path and catch my right ankle at just the wrong angle and BAM it rolls over HARD and I go down in a heap, landing on my left knee and elbow on the asphalt. I yell out an expletive as I take stock of my body - OK nothing broken, ankle is pretty bad but this is like the millionth time I've rolled this one so I drag myself up and start walking to see if I can put weight on it. Good news, I could, so then I try jogging and it's doing OK. I gotta get to the finish anyway as that's where my car is so I run/limp bleeding as hard as I could and actually held a 7-flat pace the final 0.1 miles.

In at 26:25, beating my result from June by one second.

Hold my line better on the MUP better, obviously. Other than that I was pacing for about 25:45 so would have been pleased with that result.

A lady finishes about 30 seconds behind me and saw the whole disaster, asking if I'm OK. Conversation goes something like this:

Lady: "You OK, that was a tough spill back there. They have a first aid kit over there if you need it."

Me: "Nah I'm good...just an idiot. I've rolled this ankle like a thousand times."

Lady: "I meant for your bleeding knee"

My daughter finished about a minute behind me for a 5K PR for her, despite going out WAY too fast like her father.


I'm an idiot. Happy with run progress this year and hoping this doesn't set me back. 24 hours later it's tough to walk on a really swollen, but Advil helps a ton.


It's a free parkrun, what do you expect? It's well-run by really nice people so we'll mix this in from time to time as we need run tests.