Run Mummy Run Challenge 2019 the results #RMRChallenge #FitB4Fifty

Way back in January I made my RMR challenge pledge with Run Mummy Run so it is time to see how I have done on my 3 pledges:

1) Run all 10 Cumbrian parkruns

This one started off so well with the New Year's Day Double at Barrow and Millom. I then combined my son's cross country with Penrith and visiting a relative in hospital with Ford (Ulverston). So i was looking good in January with 4/10 of complete.

I then had a couple of trips back to my home parkrun at Fell Foot. There was then a break due to other commitments and races and it wasn't until my son had a race at Threkeld that I managed to run Keswick parkrun.

It wasn't until the school holidays that I made it to Carlisle parkrun by combining it with our drive to Scotland. We then sneaked a cheeky Scottish parkrun in on our way home at Victoria park, Glasgow. My 9th different parkrun was not in Cumbria either as I ran at Dinton Pastures outside Reading whilst visiting friends.

My next Cumbrian parkrun (8/10) was Whinlatter in September, one of the hardest in the UK, which was stunning but tough. This left me with the two that are the hardest to get to due to the geography of Cumbria. I have decided that these have to wait for warmer weather and we can camp over the night before.

So to make up for it I ran 3 other parkruns which are either closer or near where we were visiting over the last 2 weeks: Tring, Morecambe Prom and Lancaster! That gave me a total of 13 different parkruns this year. In fact the only one on this image I didn't do this year us Lanhydrock:

2) Complete the Lakeland Trails 10 km series: Cartmel, Hawkshead, Helvellyn and Ullswater

#RMRChallenge Lakeland Trails Dirty Double 2019

More than 10 months after I signed up for the Lakeland Trails Dirty Double, as part of my RMR Challenge, it was finally race weekend! The forecast was dire for Saturday and we set off up towards the Kirkstone Pass with no views due to the clouds. Luckily when we reached Glenridding it was dry and just a bit grey:

Day 1: Helvellyn 5k/10k

We registered for our respective races (10k for me 5k for him) and then just had to try to keep warm until our starts:

My race set off at 11 AM and I tried to make sure I didn't get carried away by the fast start as we headed out through Glenridding. We passed the 5k turning point and headed up towards Helvellyn and the Youth Hostel:

#RMRChallenge Run Report 5-1-19 Penrith parkrun #loveparkrun

As we all know when you have an annual challenge like the RMR Challenge, if you don't start as you mean to go on and get the miles or events under your belt early doors its easy to get behind and fail... With that in mind I realised that I could manage to do parkrun number 3/10 this weekend at Penrith whilst en route to my son's cross country. This did entail leaving at 8 o'clock in the morning which caused a few issues:

1. I hadn't preprogrammed the sat nav before leaving the house which meant
2. My 12 year old had to programme the sat nav and as he wasn't very awake and I couldn't look we put in the postcode and not the venue which meant
3. We were taken to a housing estate in the middle of Penrith and not to the football club which meant
4. I had to park quite a way from the start and had a quick jog across the field to arrive after the briefing had started - but I did make it!

The course is very different from the ones I have done before. It is 2 laps of all the sports fields and twiddly bits at Penrith FC. The whole route is on pretty well maintained paths or in the car park:

Having run the first little stretch with Ron (the Run Director from Fell Foot - a nice surprise) I realised I had run my first kilometre under 7 minutes which is a bit too fast for me at the minute! So I slipped back into my intervals mode. Not having any hills and not knowing the course made it hard to decide where to do this, but there where some obvious turns that I used:

Run Mummy Run Challenge 2019 #RMRChallenge #FitB4Fifty

In 2018 my running dropped off due a combination of factors:

• Plantar Fasciitis which needed insoles to improve so I could get running again
• The heatwave... I really don't like temperatures above 25 C so running was definitely off the cards!
• Work - it was great getting an almost full time temporary contract but fitting in running has been hard!
• No challenges - I had only signed up for one race (which I missed due to a holiday!) so had no incentive to get out the door...

My son challenged me to run every day in December to get me back on track. It was interesting some days to squeeze a mile in every day and some times I had to do a long run to make up for having to miss a day. In the end I ran over 36 miles in 31 days which was my best month of the year:

So I have decided that I need a challenge to do better in 2019, to this end I committed to the Run Mummy Run Challenge for 2019. This allows us to choose our own targets for the year which we had to share online:

So to see those in a more legible form: