pickupthepacepaul

I haven’t ran parkrun for a long time. I need to motivate myself, but mostly I enjoy running with others. My boy hasn’t been interested in running, so I haven’t made the effort. So in the morning when my son woke up and said Joe Wicks is running our local parkrun and he wanted to go I jumped at the opportunity.

When we arrived at nonsuch, it was extremely busy… There were thousands of people there. Looking at the results there were 1,108 finishers, but in addition many extra supporters. We made our way to the start, and it felt great to be back at parkrun.

We set off way to quick. I just let my boy set the pace and assumed he was keen to push. It was particularly busy so I was worrying about him falling.

Pretty quickly he was telling me how he didn’t like running and it was too hard, and we spent most of the run walking. But I’m grateful for all the runners who gave encouragement, as I try to educate my son that its fine if its hard and also its ok to walk.

I was wearing my adidas walking boots which had a good balance between comfort and stability. We ran / walk the second half and Joe Wicks wasn’t far behind us. I didn’t try running with him as it would be too crowded. We picked up the pace at the end and finished in 33:26.

Just after we finished Joe Wicks came through so we had a nice chat and photo as we walked through the finish chute.

I am glad my boy came back to run parkrun with Joe Wicks. It didn’t go well for him so I don’t expect him to come with me again any time soon. But when he is ready I will be waiting.