Despite the comfortable bed at The Blueberry Hotel in Pontypridd, Wales (see yesterday's blog), I slept poorly. My stomach was a little sensitive, perhaps the copious amounts of cheese on the previous nights ham and pineapple pizza reacted poorly with my lactose intolerance. When I checked the weather app on my phone and saw that it was a brisk -2 degrees in Pontypridd that morning, I would be lying if I said I wasn't too disappointed to see that Pontypridd's parkrun was cancelled due to ice that morning.
It does however mean I am currently stuck on 24 parkruns and, for anyone else involved in the parkrun community, I'll have to wait until next week to qualify for my 25 runs t-shirt. In my head, it was a nice story in the making. It was at Pontypridd's Ynysangharad War Memorial Park that I made my parkrun debut during my third year of university in September 2017. I finished with, what I thought, a meagre time of 37:18 and went home embarrassed at my lack of fitness and with a severe case of delayed-onset-muscle-soreness, a.k.a. DOMS. So embarrassed I was that I chose not to return to parkrun until February of last year, seven and a half years after my first. Ultimately, it was a failure in mindset and represents a time in my life when I let myself gain a lot of weight, become incredibly unfit (atleast compared to where I was), and as a result it means a bit more to me to come back and "defeat" this parkrun, as it were.
I found in my second ever parkrun at Medway Great Lines Park that not only was I more unfit but I experienced even worse DOMS! This time, however, I persevered and I was determined to run as many parkruns as possible in 2025 regardless of if I had to walk or even crawl them. All in all, I completed a further 22 parkruns in 2025 where I now regularly finish in 33-35 minutes with a PB of 32:20. Getting my 25th parkrun at Pontypridd would have felt like a good way to come back and face my laziness demons and prove to myself that the course had not defeated me all those years ago.
One of the positives of parkrun being cancelled was that Fred and I found a fantastic little cafe in Pontypridd Market, called Nick and Izzy's, where we enjoyed a sublime breakfast. After grabbing a couple of Welshcakes (it would be rude not to), we parted ways on another great mini-trip with Fred (and Gav for a bit too).
While I failed to get my 25th at Ponty parkrun, I refuse to let my first attempt there in 2017 be my last and I promise to return to get it done and close that chapter properly.
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