Park Life - Blur

Lyric:- And it's not about you joggers who go round and round and round

Now it's not very often that I say at 7:30am on a Saturday, 'Right let's go and do parkrun'. But then again, I'd probably been building up to it for most of the week, if I'm being honest, as I wanted to mark my hospital discharge with some kind of feat.

Officially, that's Monday and I didn't quite know what to expect from this mornings crusade. It turned out to be a crusade too or a definite baptism of fire as the 5kms was ten times further than I'd ever run since I've had Guillain Barre Syndrome, these past five months.

What started off with a very modest walk with Lady C and the boys in a buggy, soon became a case of, 'I'm not coming bloody last' and although it was far from pretty, I jogged as far and as fast as my legs would safely take me, until I slowed to my walking speed.

700 runners starting to come back past me after 1km on the pan-handled course, down here in Cardiff, made a huge fuss of me and the encouragement was an undeniable accelerant to the emotion burning inside of me. Wow, I was in floods of tears...

Luckily, no one saw them, only those of my amazingly supportive wife as I sprinted (that's a complete over-exaggeration) those last 100 metres like my life depended on them.

I suppose in a way they do. It's shown me how much hard work I've been prepared to put in to getting back on the road for MdS2017 and that 1,000th marathon, the majority of which has been of my own volition. More importantly though to see just how hard being normal is, when it's really obvious there's still a long, long to way.

Then beauty was though, I was encouraged to feel normal by the other 730 folk there this morning and that is where parkrun really exceeds. I'll be back next week to make inroads intoto my 729th position and now 58:06pw.

Will you?

Rory Coleman - 976 Marathons - 241 Ultras
13 Marathon des Sables - 9 Guinness World Records - 8277 Days' Alcohol Free
The UK's Leading ULTRA-Marathon Coach.