From 52 to 2012

I have discovered a very strange world after the end of the 52 challenge.

Having worked up to a frenzy by the end of the year, I thought I would be glad when it was all over. No more discipline of making sure I take photos of anything I might log as a challenge, or clearing time to make sure I could get online when I needed to.

But, come 10pm on 31 December, and the posting of my 52nd new thing, instead of feeling relief I suddenly felt ridiculously proud of myself. I had come up with this outwardly silly idea a full 12 months earlier and stuck with it all the way through the year. Some of the challenges were bigger than others, but all were important to me for one reason or another.

This followed naturally on with thoughts of what I would do next: what will I feel proud of in December 2012? There are a number of reasons why 2012 looms even more horribly than 2011 did, so what can I think of next?

52 more things is the obvious thing, but also a bit toooo obvious. Plus the discipline, while undeniably helpful, has been a bind at times.  Then there is the problem of the successes of 2011 spilling over into 2012: the choir continues, the scavenger hunt goes on, the successes of my little craft world in 'says alice' desperately need to be built upon, I'm speed reading for book club and behind in arranging the next film club get-together. Is finding more new things really the right thing to do, or would the whole exercise become counter intuitive?

We began 2012 with a wander to see the seals and hopefully seal pups at Horsey beach. Which is where it occurred to me that I really wanted to share the seals with the blogging community that I had found, even though it was too late to be a first. Which I then realised made me a bona fide blogger. Which I THEN realised meant I didn't need a challenge, I could always just, you know, blog.

I am sure most of you know this already and could probably have told me months ago. 

The end result is that after a morning of playing around with blog layout and getting very frustrated indeed with the tools in blogger, I have done a minor relaunch of the blog and will be taking it forward into 2012. It is strange not to have the structure of the challenge and we'll have to see where it goes, but I'm looking forward to it all the same.

For now, here are some of those wonderful seals. The sign on the walk up to the beach was a request from the local wildlife trust to ask us to keep to the dunes to avoid disturbing the seals and to apologise for any inconvenience caused by the seals pupping in the wrong place. I am rather pleased that they did.

I particularly like the big stripes they leave on the gravel when they drag themselves about. They really are quite ungainly and the pups look tremendously vulnerable as they can't escape to the sea until their fur is waterproof at 6 - 8 weeks old.

So, that's me as a blogger out there in the big wide world, Hope to see some of you along the way!

Number 35: Parkrun

I am very pleased there aren't any pictures of this one!

On Saturday I joined in our local Parkrun, which is a free timed 5k run that's open to anyone to join in. It's important to say for starters that I am most definitely NOT a runner and in the past I have used a large variety of excuses to stay out of a pair of trainers. I have done a few Race for Lifes (with no training at all) so I know I can move my feet faster when sponsorship is involved, so in principle I should be able to do it for my own benefit too, right? Hmmm...

The problem that I come up against every time is that fitness only works if you get into a routine of working on it regularly, otherwise you just get all of the pain and none of the gain. For some reason I hate running from home as it is all roads, junctions and dodging cars, and also not much fun when the nights start to draw in. But isn't it defeating the object to drive somewhere to do some running? Haven't I laughed at people who drive to the gym to spend an hour on a running machine, then drive home?

On the face of it, Parkrun seems designed for people like me. It is free; it's non competitive; it's timed each week, so you can see if you make progress; it's open to all comers; it's just far enough away for me to need to drive rather than walk so I don't feel too lazy. I have a friend who has been a regular for a while and was very encouraging, saying that the 150+ runners who go regularly are a friendly bunch and that the organisers wouldn't pack up and go home before I wobbled over the line.

So I grabbed the last parking space at 10 to 9 on Saturday morning and followed the stragglers to the pavillion at Eaton Park, just in time to see 200 gathered runners turn to face me and start moving towards the start line. My rapid retreat was possibly the fastest pace of the day!

The course is three laps of the Park, which is mercifully quite flat and on wide pavements. I found a place at the back and got started, falling into pace with two very friendly ladies who had also only been to a few races before. Like me they were not 'runners' but enjoyed the fresh air and exercise at the start of the weekend, and had both seen their times improve over around 10 events.

I continued with one of them for two laps, then had to run/walk the last lap to ensure I crossed the line on my own feet rather than on a stretcher. I was actually quite pleased that I kept a mooch/jog pace for as long as I did and think that one of my first targets will be to keep it up for the whole 5k.

From which you can tell that I would like to go again. I hesitate to get too over enthusiastic and say I'll be a regular, but I'll definitely be back. The only real downside was a general feeling that a lot of the people there were proper runners, using Parkrun as a benchmark for their training. But, other than being lapped by a lot of people, there was no sense of disadvantage at being a beginner, or being treated differently by the organisers. On the contrary, when I logged my time (second from last) the lady who registered me was really supportive, even though at the time I must have looked like my most significant achievement was survival.

My time? 37 minutes and 20 seconds. In fact, my Parkrun personal best :-)