Team Write This Run

Earlier this year I went to the inaugural Write This Run conference for running bloggers. It was a fantastic day which I really enjoyed, inspirational and educational speakers as well as meeting lots of likeminded bloggers, many of who I’d talked to on Twitter but never met. A great day.

I also recently attended a workshop hosted by Liz and Laura, the duo behind Write This Run. We spent the day thinking and talking about our blogs. From creating an identity, and finding our niche to achieving our blogging goals. It was another inspiring day spent in great company.

At the workshop Liz and Laura mentioned that they were putting a team together for the Women’s Running 10K race in Finsbury Park and said that they were looking for volunteers. I haven’t run a 10K race this year, the distance had been something of a nemesis for me last year and I’d never performed very well. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to put that right, so I volunteered and was really pleased to be invited to be part of the team.

One of the perks of being on the team, as well as free entry to the race, is the opportunity to blog on the Women’s Running website. Pretty cool huh? So I now have my own little space over there and you can check out my training blogs here.

I say, check out my training blogs but in reality I’ve done little running at all in the last few weeks thanks to my pesky injury. A couple of 5K parkruns were all I’d managed to do until this Friday when I met up with the rest of team Write This Run for a 4 mile loop of Hyde Park.

It was lovely to meet the rest of the team – I knew from reading their blogs that most of them are significantly faster than me so I was a bit nervous about running with them. We stayed together while we warmed up for the first mile or so and then naturally broke up into a couple of groups. I ran/walked/chatted my way around the perimeter of the park with Mercy – it was a beautiful evening, if a little warm and it was lovely to get to know another member of the team a little better.

I’ve got to admit that I struggled a bit. It was warm, my legs were tired after quite a heavy week of training, I was carrying a rucksack that felt quite heavy and I struggled to regulate my breathing as I was talking too much! All in all one of those runs when things just don’t come together.

But as Mercy said, we all have bad runs and now that one is out of the way hopefully everything will come together on race day itself.

While I’ve not been able to run much I’ve still been training hard over the last few weeks. Weight lifting, HIIT, yoga and Reformer Pilates have all been part of my preparation and I’m feeling quietly confident that I’ll set a new 10K PB next Saturday.