I Come 100th in my 100th

There’s no such thing, not any more at least, as a free parkrun t-shirt. I’m glad I didn’t find this out until after my 100th parkrun yesterday. Here I am, sweating my way to the finish in many degrees of heat in London’s Brockwell Park. My longest-serving friend was on the finish line camera in hand, having cleared the course and recovered her breath before I rocked up.

And here’s the t-shirt I was expecting to get to mark the occasion. When I reached 50 runs, I received the red one: an incentive gift from parkrun. 

It’s taken me a long time to get from 50 to 100. In-between the two milestones, a bad back and lockdowns meant I missed many parkruns and many were cancelled. I've been quipping that my motivation has been the free t-shirt. It's been a means of self-deprecation, of saying that I'm not serious about running, not really. 

Checking the parkrun website today, I've discovered that by 2021 the cost of sending out free t-shirts had become unsustainable due to its popularity and the numbers of people reaching milestones. I’d missed this news item, and I appreciate the development as a very good thing. UK parkrun statistics are impressive: there are 790 event locations in the UK If you'd attended the Norwich Christmas Day parkrun in 2019, you'd have been in a crowd of 1360 runners. The record number at my regular course, Shrewsbury, is 733. Running in a community helps me to keep going, and I suspect it helps the millions of park runners worldwide too. 

So, I have to admit, the free t-shirt banter has been a decoy. I parkrun because it makes me feel great: alive and thankful that I can move my body. The run itself can be hard to get into some weeks, but I’ve learnt to give myself a better chance of enjoying it by having a regular Friday night bedtime, stretching before and after runs, and by drinking plenty of water. Parkrun has been the means by which I’ve started to listen to my body more closely and to notice what it needs.

And parkrun, with its way of looking on the bright side, has been good for my mind too. My younger son encouraged me to get a personal best for my 100th run. Not a chance, I said, mindful of the heat and Brockwell Park's hills. But then I did. I ran this particular course faster than the other time I ran it, meaning my results email said: "Congratulations on setting a new Personal Best at this event!" It also turns out I was the 100th female finisher on my 100th run. I managed that statistic without even trying. Parkrun - it's a glass half-full event.

What I’m noticing right now is that my body needs a new t-shirt, and so for that matter does my soul.  I’m going to get onto the website and order one just as soon as I've finished this blog, and what's more, I'll pay up more than willingly. 

I Inflate My Pyjamas

Disclaimer:

The first thing to say is that I got it wrong. Now that I'm back on-grid, I've been able search inflating pyjamas for life-saving. I came across this video from the US Navy which I strongly recommend you watch rather than following any of what follows (if at any point you think I must try this at home.)

I Inflate My Pyjamas

But you too may be of an age to have inflated your pyjama bottoms while engaged in Bronze / Silver / Gold awards in school swimming lessons. 

I walked with my schoolfriends to the Swiss Cottage baths. This memory came up for me while holidaying with my Longest-Serving Friend in North Wales. 

Did you wrestle with your pyjamas while treading water and fifty years later wonder why, if it was even possible? My Longest-Serving Friend said she did.

We were eco camping to stave off the world for a while, so standards plummeted, and Tuesday was sticky with heat, risotto, sun cream, and fly repellent.

We made a plan, took our pyjamas to change into after swimming. Here's the lake - the water a warm-cool blue: more France than Snowdonia.

We walked in without gasping, swam about, cooled off. The paddle boarders were few and distant. The mountains looked on, thirstily. 

Dressing pragmatically (straight into pyjamas) we talked about swimming and long-ago pyjamas: fly-sewn-up, patched at the knee, handed down from brothers. 

We returned to the lake and working from memory, I submerged my pyjamas, then tied a knot at the end of each leg. I blew in through the waist.

My Longest-Serving Friend took on the drowning. She splashed about, trod water, swam what would've been lengths, said, help. 

I knotted and blew. We laughed and I blew. I tied  more knots. She said, I'd be dead by now. We giggled; but it's no laughing matter, drowning.

They were right to teach us to aid each others' survival. Two to a cubicle, we learned to wriggle out of wet costumes. We sat together through Maths in damp cardigans.

I tried to remember. My pyjamas inflated for seconds, a tartan balloon, before sinking. There's no way I'd have saved myself with these half-memories.  

That day was perfect - the lake calm and warm. It was total immersion, a cleansing joy. We swam about, came out pure and new, soothed and happy. 

We came out saved, buoyant.