Swansea Bay Parkrun Review

Today me and the BF woke up at the horrendously early time of 7:30am to try out Swansea Bay Parkrun for the first time. The start is only a kilometer or so away from campus, so we left at 8:30 and walked along the seafront to get there.

Blue skies and sun for once!

My first thought upon arriving was "wow, there are a lot more people here than at my home parkrun", which was swiftly followed by "they all look fast, I'm going to come in last", and then "no you're not, and even if it did, it wouldn't matter". Even though it was only 5 kilometers, it was my longest run since coming back after six months of nothing, and BF's first 5k ever, so I set my target to around the 35 - 36 minutes mark.

The route is basically an out and back from the 360 cafe to Blackpill on the cycle path, and is almost entirely flat (garmin recorded an elevation of 54ft over the 3.1 miles). Because the path is open to the public and pretty popular we had to dodge some cyclists and non-parkrunners, but as the mass of runners thinned out we managed to stay on the 'pedestrian' side of the path and not over spill into the 'cyclist' side. 

The route, right by the beach :)

About a kilometer in I lost sight of the BF and carried on at my own merry pace. Usually I have to walk after only 0.5 miles of running, but this time I managed to reach the half way mark before taking a break. I was so proud of myself! On the way back I employed my run 0.5 miles/walk 1 minute strategy that had served me well for the past week, and found the energy to sprint to the finish when the cafe came back into view. I quickly found BF on the grass by the finish tunnel where he said he'd recorded a time of around 29 minutes according to the Strava app, and had only finished a few minutes before me. We went and got our bar codes scanned by the lovely volunteers, and decided to walk back to campus as a cool down.

Taken approximately 30 seconds after finishing!

Thanks to the wonderful volunteers I received my results email only an hour after we left, and I was pretty pleased with my time of 33:40, well under my prediction! The BF came in in 29:31, which is great especially as this was his first 5k ever. See the Strava activity here!

I found the event to be incredibly well organised and the marshals were very encouraging and supportive. I'm definitely going to try and get in the habit of waking up early on the weekends to get a parkrun in before most of my flatmates have even woken up!

Hope the weather where you are is as nice as it is here,
Rowan