The parkrun is without doubt the most fun you can have, for free, on a Saturday morning at 8am, for less than 17 minutes. I know a lot of you are thinking there are other alternatives but being happily married with three wonderful daughters I’m going for the parkrun every time.  Being the competitive bugger I am I love the stats that are available online including my favourite , the age graded best times. Being of an advanced age I love the fact I can be near the top of the table as all those young whipper-snappers who streak past me are then pulled down to earth by age, or lack of. Sorry boys, you may be quicker but if we add Father Time into the equation you are eating my dust! Age category records and age graded tables level the playing field and , albeit virtually, let me rise higher than my speedier younger opponents.

I just checked the age graded tables and I had moved to 3rd place on my local parkrun table. Apparently some young gun ran a 15:10 and even taking into account his tender years was still ahead of me. Luckily I am still getting older (funnily enough) and will move into the 50+ age group in a few months. It will then be on for young and old, literally. With age on my side I am confident I will moving back to the top of the table. Maybe they should start age adjusting marathon times so we wouldn’t know who really won until all the runners were finished and then maths combined with age, rather than finishing times, would determine the winner. Maybe not, we have age groups to race in and that is enough. That being said I still love the age category and age graded tables the parkrun website produces.

There are many ways to run a parkrun. For me I open the pain box and settle in for the 16 or so minutes it takes me to complete the event. The Carine parkrun,  in Perth, starts on a hill so all ideas about pacing and taking the first kilometre easy go out the window the moment the starter lets us go. I mean it’s only 5k what could possibly go wrong ? Well I have a funny story about when 5k runs go wrong, spectacularly !

A couple  of years ago I had suffered a confidence hit after a bad marathon and was struggling competing in some of the longer WAMC (West Australian Marathon Club) club runs. To this end I started to concentrate on the shorter distances in an effort to maybe grab the odd bling for a top 3 podium finish and also to get the whole racing thing over with sooner rather than later. Thus I found myself at the start of the Founders 16k/5.15k race determined to grab a top 3 podium medal. The start pistol went off and I sprinted away from the field confident in my ability to complete the 5k event with ease. At the time this was probably only my second or third 5k distance so I was really relying on bravado with little experience to back up my 1oom starting pace. Needless to say at about the 1.5k mark I started to get the first inkling things were not going as planned. If I was a car the head gasket was just about to blow and the engine was certainly not good for the remainder of the race. The eventual winner went past me like a train at around the 2k mark and remarked afterwards he could see I was gone and actually felt sorry for me ! The second placed 5k runner got me about 3k which meant I had to hang on for 2k to grab my bling and make the pain box time just about bearable. With about 500m to go my friend Mark Lee overtook me but that was ok as we had spoken at the start line and he was doing the 16k. No problem as we approached the finishing chute I had accomplished my goal, just needed Mark to run past and all was good. Imagine my surprise when instead of running past the chute Mr.Lee ran through it grabbing third place, he then proceeded to keep running all the way to the toilet as he had been taken short and this was his escape plan. He was rewarded with a medal while all I got for the race from hell what a hard lesson in pacing,  even the shorter distances. I can still vividly recall those last 2k when the legs were gone and the heart rate was through the roof and I was deep in the pain box getting a ‘right royal seeing too’. This really was a way not to race a 5k and since then I have ran many parkruns and finished like a train,  rather than a second hand Ford Escort with a blown head gasket and oil leaking from every orifice.

It’s the same when you watch track and field and you watch the  800m’s. Normally someone goes off like they’ve been shot from a cannon and for the first lap you think they’ve blown away the field but when the legs go they go quickly and 200-300m later they’re going backwards quicker than a Hilary Clinton victory speech.

A succesful parkrun is all about pacing, as is all running truth be told. You need to decide at the start what each kilometre will be ran in and then stick to your plan. The good thing about park running is you get to do the whole thing again next week,  so if you do finish and it’s too easy , or fall apart in a heap, you can adjust next week and learn from your mistakes. You also have the added benefit of all your times stored on the website , normally with photos, and you can watch as you rise up the age graded table and do battle in your age group.

There is also the social side of parkrun which is just as important as the racing. Every weekend you can get down to your local park and run with your mates and then ,over a coffee and muffin, give each other sh*t discussing the morning run.  As you can imagine there is a lot of that going on within the St Georges Terrace Running Club when we all decide to race.

Either way the parkrun is without doubt the best thing you can do for less than 17 minutes on a Saturday morning, unless you have another idea?…….