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.