A post about running and Parkrun A few years ago when I was living in Munich I started to get into running. My motivation at the time was that I was hanging onto my twenties and I wanted to be in shape. I had a naive, "it's now or never" idea and I thought that I'd never know what I was capable of if I waited too late to get in shape. I went from couch to half marathon in 10 weeks and have kept an intermittent approach to running ever since. I later moved to Birmingham and somehow heard about an event called Parkrun, I think in 2013. This really appealed to me. The concept is that every week at nine am on a Saturday in various locations around the UK people can do a free timed run of 5km. Typically a few hundred people turn up to each event and when I last checked there were North of 400 of them in the UK. To me its an exclusively positive idea and I got quite into it over the years. There is a great community atmosphere at these runs. Recently, I was back in Berlin for an extended New Year break. I learned a few days prior that Parkrun was coming to Germany and the first ever one in Berlin was happening at Hasenheide volkspark whilst I was there. I just had to attend and the photographs above are from this event. My motivation for running goes a bit deeper than all of this. Last year I ran in an event called Equinox 24. The concept is that in a team you run as many laps of a 10km trail run as possible within 24 hours. I was in a large team so only needed to do three laps. This year a friend and I intend to do it in a pair and we hope to run upwards of 120km each within the 24 hours. I recognise that this will not be easy! One of my best friends passed away a few years ago in her late twenties and there's a charity called framework that helped her a lot whilst she was still alive. I'm motivated to raise money for this cause in her memory. I recognise that it's not really possible to just turn up and run 120km in a day without serious conditioning and training so that's what I'm already doing in preparation for September 2018. Including running my first ever full marathon in February. All of my running is about this goal in September.
