First post, about my first 10k

So here we are, my first blog post. Not the first post I've ever written on a blog, because I've populated a blog page on a company website for various things before, but the first time I've ever had a personal blog. Yes, that's the sort of sentence length and structure you can expect from me. Strap in.

My general thought is to chuck stuff on here as and when I feel like it. This might mean we get stuff on a whole host of random topics but that might work.

I have no plan for this first post, but something had to break the ice.

One of the main things occupying me at the moment is running. I started running about 3 years ago, certainly with no particular future in mind for it as a pastime. My boss at the time had signed up to run the BUPA 10k in London, promptly forgotten about it, remembered 2 or 3 weeks ahead of the date and then panicked that he wasn't fit enough. He didn't want to ditch his responsibilities completely so he asked someone to take his place. I agreed, and promptly forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, at about 4am, at the end of a 13 hour pub shift, said boss turns to me as we sat down with a pint and says, "Isn't that BUPA thing tomorrow?"

It is. Of course at this point 'tomorrow' is really 'today'. The race starts in 4.5 hours.

3 hours later I've had a couple of hours' sleep on the sofa of a mate who lived very near both the pub and the railway station and I'm on a train to London.

In all honesty I hadn't put a great deal of energy or effort into it anyway. I'd made a point of jogging around Stoke Park a bit, a couple of times, when I first agreed to it. I certainly didn't have any proper running gear or anything like that, so the tracksuit bottoms I borrowed from a mate and the tshirt I'd had in my bag, teamed with my basic trainers, comprised my professional athlete attire du jour. I hadn't heaped too much expectation on myself either, as it was my first attempt at such a thing and I'd done no training. I'd had a quick look online and found that a proper athlete person might do their 10k in 30 minutes, the average runny person was probably looking for 45 minutes ish, and anything quicker than an hour was at least not going to be embarrassing. I had resolved to do better than an hour. Minimal stress thanks.

I knew one other person who would be doing it too, who had signed up with my boss and kept flipping between being amused that he'd wussed-out and being annoyed that he might have been left doing it on his own. He had been training, by the way. He mentioned it a few times in the half hour or so between meeting him at the park and the beginning of the race. While he was casually dropping tidbits about his gruelling training regimen I was increasingly surrounded by people who looked...what's the word...fit. They were stretching. All I was stretching was the meaning of 'minimal' in regards to those stress levels of mine.

BUPA 10k Start (Birdcage Walk)

"Screw it, I'm here now, how hard can it be? What am I gonna do, die?" Off to the start line. No, it's not as simple as that, there are half a dozen different start lines, right, OK. Locate my start 'segment'. Wait for the 'Go' call. Packed in like a rush hour Central Line carriage but it's only for a minute. "Go!" Spend several agonising minutes shuffling along like a rush hour Central Line carriage have all been instructed to move down even though there isn't any space. Then we're jogging. No real speed yet but that's fine by me, although I am feeling cheated of those 3 or 4 minutes, unable to get the 'an hour is embarrassing' thought out of my head.

BUPA 10k action shot

The thing itself went ok-ish. Ran most of it, walked a bit a couple of times. The first time I broke down into a walk I felt like a complete failure. The second time I realised a lot of people were doing the same. It also helps that my walking pace is quicker than some peoples' jog. One other observation is that however good you think you are judging distance, the mile markers on a race always seem to be wildly inaccurate, leaving you angry that the next one hasn't come up yet, or unshakeably certain that you've missed one somehow. Anyway, I finished in 54 minutes ish, which was nothing to shout about but was fine.

What was I talking about? Yes, running's on my mind again now. Between that 10k and today, I've run quite a lot of races of various distances, but in this last year I haven't done very much, largely due to old injuries acting up a bit. In two days' time though I'm running my first race of 2019, the Hillingdon Half Marathon. I'm hoping it'll fire me up and encourage me to train hard for some big races later in the year. It'd be helpful if it went well.

I might write about it.