Running has become a bit of a luxury for me in the past couple of months, preoccupied as we have been with moving house, emptying boxes and making it generally habitable, while it’s just the three of us living in it…

Needless to say this scuppered all my plans for Leicester Half (I did run it, but at training rather than racing pace) and for regaining my speed over 5k – 10k distances by Christmas.

The one consolation in this time of almost no exercise, and the thing that has kept my morale up (apart from the obvious joy of moving into a new house of course!) has been my return to my local Parkrun: Participating in Parkruns more regularly has been something I wanted for a long time, and it’s now come to fill the hole left by the expiry of Muddy Saturdays (which had begun to dwindle even before we moved house).

I owe this return entirely to the improving influence of a new friend, Kyriakos, with whom we became acquainted through a post about the Leicester Half on the blog I used to maintain prior to this. We initially arranged to meet at our local Parkrun so I could give him some more information on the half marathon, but we discovered we had much more to talk about, so now he and his wife Monica are becoming increasingly good friends to Demi and I.

And as he is an avid Parkrunner, every Friday evening I will receive a message reminding me that at 8:30 the following morning I am expected in Braunstone Park.

I also wanted to write about how it feels to have made Parkrun part of my routine, but that bit isn’t coming naturally: Among the various transitions from old house to new, Muddy Saturday to Parkrun etc., I don’t feel I have a routine yet. So a post for another day maybe!