If you’d told me a year ago that I’d leave the house early on a Saturday to run in a park when it’s barely above freezing, I wouldn’t have believed you. And yet that’s what happened this last weekend.

A year ago I’d just started my Couch to 5km adventure and it feels like a lot has happened in that time. Since my last entry in March, I’ve managed to both increase my speed, become more consistent and actually run a full five kilometres. With hindsight, I can see that I did much right but a few things wrong. As before, I think it’s worth writing about both as a help for people starting in the same place as me and as a reminder for myself. Knowing that I had difficulty keeps me going on days where I feel I’m doing badly!

I left my last post having completed the C25K programme but not having actually run the full 5K. (The programme helps you run 5K or for thirty minutes. That’s small print for you.)

My initial plan was to gradually increase my speed until I could run the full 5km in thirty minutes. That’s what I did for a while until I realised that it was going to take me a long time! So for one week I changed tack and concentrated on distance rather than speed. By that point it was actually quite easy but I’m glad I did it, if only to tick a virtual check box.

In trying to improve my consistency, the main thing I think I’ve learned is that I’ve been a terrible judge of how tired I actually am. There’s a difference between “not feeling it” and not being capable of running the full duration. With the benefit of hindsight, I could almost certainly have pressed on with some of the later stages of the C25K programme and finished sooner. Which is not to say that I think I erred; being cautious meant that I avoided getting injured. Doing exercise was (is) a bigger goal than completing a 5km run.

Around the same time, I’d started hearing about something called Parkrun. The arrival of spring and the desire for a change from running on a treadmill in the gym made me open to a change, even if it meant turning up to a local park early on a Saturday.

While I liked the idea, I didn’t want to find that I couldn’t finish or that people would sneer at me for finishing last. Turns out I misjudged the atmosphere and how competitive it would be. But I didn’t know, and I spent a couple of weeks trying to run outside before I even attempted it.

After all that time in the gym, I found running outside to be quite challenging. I had to pace myself rather than have the treadmill “force” me to continue at a known speed. Harder still, I had to plot my route in advance!

Having spent the rest of the year mostly running outside, oddly I now find running on a treadmill to be a challenge.

Back to Parkrun. After a couple of weeks practicing outside I went to my local in Tooting. I think I was expecting a handful of sporty people wearing Lycra sprinting around. What I actually found was over five hundred people of all abilities. There were the athletes but there were also people with baby buggies, teenagers and pensioners. Not only was I not out of place, but I didn’t even come in last place. And not even that but it was a supportive crowd meaning that my fears of finishing last were utterly misplaced. It’s not a race, it’s only as competitive as you want it to be. Oh, and it’s incredibly well organised, mostly run by volunteers.

This wasn’t supposed to be an advert for Parkrun. (Still, you should consider doing it.)

Since early summer I’ve stuck to doing two or three runs a week outside. When I started the running, my not-running days I typically went swimming. Recently I’ve started alternating that with some resistance training. But the running is still the “backbone” of my exercise regime.

What next? Well, winter is on the way so I’m interested to see how motivated I am to keep running outside! I still have no grand goal, no major objective to run a marathon or reach any particular race time. This is partly because exercise is the real goal but mostly because I want to be realistic. I’ve taken nearly ten minutes off my time for running 5km over the summer but, without some serious effort that I’m not likely to ever put in, constant improvement from here is going to be a lot harder.

But I’m going to keep trying!