It was twelve years to the week since I ran my first parkrun. I was lined up on the start line in Dulwich, south London hoping to break 18 minutes for the first time. A new PB at the age of 48. Could I do it? Rewind to that first parkrun on a sunny Saturday in September 2012. Five months previously I had run the London Marathon with no training and severe cramp, announcing that running was not for me. Now I found myself lining up with 150 local runners in a park at 9am preparing to run 5km. At 36 I was already past my prime and had discovered running late through that charity entry to the marathon. A few months later and the memory of the pain had subsided, leading me to approach a man in a high viz jacket to enquire why all these people were running around my local park. He shared about parkrun and invited me along to the next one. It was free. It was timed. It was weekly. And it was a much shorter distance than a marathon. I reasoned that if I had run/limped/crawled 26.2 miles, then