Strathclyde Confidence Booster

My friend, Maggie, has been injured for months but is back running now, so I thought it would be a, no pressure, confidence booster for her to do a parkrun that she hasn't run before. She would be guaranteed a, post race, email advising her that she had run a PB and wouldn't be comparing her time with previous ones. So we headed towards Motherwell to do Strathclyde parkun #223.  As for myself, this would be my 15th outing at the Lanarkshire event but I wasn't sure if I would run around with Maggie or just do my own thing, as a result, I wasn't wearing my club vest. 

There wasn't enough time for a decent warm up and stretch before the 9:30am Start and there wasn't anyone that I could see that I wanted to race against, so I set off looking for a decent, if not spectacular, run. 4:16 at the 1k mark was fine by me, as was 10:50 at the half way point, where for me, the race really started as I overtook someone at the turn and set off trying to reel in some of the others in front. I had a bit of a race going on, playing leap frog with a guy in a yellow top, before managing to loose him and cross the line in 31st place, with a time of 21:34. I was, initially a bit disappointed with my time but later realised that this was my third fastest time ever at Strathclyde parkrun and fastest since 2nd July 2011! Maggie done well, running a decent time and, of course, getting that course PB.

After our warm down, we ventured to the other side of the park to Guiseppe's Coffee Shop in the MD Theme park, rather than the usual Waterfront Cafe, for the usual post race, coffee, bacon roll and banter.

Thanks to all the volunteers for a great event and to Andrew Scott for the race selfie.