It’s scary how quickly you lose fitness. A month on from Berlin, and I swear yesterday’s “only 14 mile” run turned into “Oh my god 14 miles is a long way” over the course of the first 800m. Can I blame my fatigue on the two mile interval session I did first? Probably not, given it was with a seven year old. While her sister was off showing me how it’s done with a junior parkrun PB, my eldest insisted on running around the block 10 times. I can only blame my genes: I’d rather have done a good track session on Saturday morning than a feeble attempt at ‘grown up’ parkrun, but our local track was closed due to a fire. Worrying, particularly as the council currently is mulling over some preposterous plans to move the entire thing about 600m for no apparent reason.

Still, it is wonderful weather for running at the moment: the fog lingering over the Thames, blunting the edges of the landscape, the dogs looming suddenly out of the fog at you and tripping you up .. ok, didn’t enjoy that one so much. Honestly, aren’t dogs supposed to have better senses than us? One actually walked headfirst into me while looking the other way, for all the world like a canine iPhone zombie.

Talking of iPhones, a word now about our Guardian running club on Strava – it’s a great place to share race info, questions, get tips and so on. The recent club update means this is all now accessible on mobile too, including the discussions. So please come and join up, if you haven’t already. Parkrunners (capital letter for start of sentence, ok?) can also find their local run on there as well – you can join as many clubs as you like, I think, though obviously mine is the best …

So, over to you – how was your weekend running? Dodging dogs, lurking through fog and triumphantly emerging into the light of a PB? Or are you, like me, at the start of a journey back to fitness, and rather wishing you could just have a Rocky-style training montage instead?

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