h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Nov 2
In yesterday’s missive I owned how paddling was taking up most of my spare time. That was quite true but it wasn’t the whole story. There was jogging as well. There was a bit of an overlap as I tried to cram both in together during the course of a week but it wasn’t practical and I ended up regularly swapping the main focus of my attentions between the two, giving one the priority over the other. Usually this would be for a couple of months at a time as I became bored with one, changing it for the other. That was all very well but it meant that I never really gave the dedication to either that they both required. The upshot was that a mediocre performance was all that was ever going to result.

In the end I’ve opted to put paddling on the permanent back burner and concentrate on jogging. In the dim and distant past I spent a lot of time running and produced some results that I impressed myself with. Twenty or so years later there is unfortunately absolutely no chance of repeating them. But jogging doesn’t require the peripheral time that paddling does. Loading boats and equipment and clothing onto cars, (twice for each trip), finding and driving miles to a venue that allows a get-in to the water and parking a car just doesn’t cut it in time saving to changing into shoes and shorts and just running out the door.

My ‘running out the door’ now consists of jogging down to the local recreation ground which is large enough for me to have marked off a loop around the perimeter that measures almost exactly a half mile. This is a convenient size in relation to the parkrun distance of 5k meters, or, just over 3 miles. So, I’m currently running around this loop 6 times to a session to cover the distance with a 2 minute rest between loops. Each loop is done at a speed that I couldn’t maintain for the full 5k which overall ends up with an increase in overall speed.

The consequence of all this is that the jogging, having received my undivided attention for a couple of months now, has brought about an improvement in the local parkrun time trials and a personal best in their age related rankings.

Onwards

Excellent! Coincidental I read this today, as parkrun is on the h2g2 Front Page A87914758

I'm in awe - I have once covered a distance of 5k in a charity walk, so I know it is rather a long way...