Easter Long Run

This morning was my first proper long run for a few months. I'm in Devon at Mum and Rob's for the Easter weekend and decided to combine the long run with a bit of Parkrun tourism. I've done the Bideford parkrun once before, and it's only about 5km from the house, so I decided to look a bit further afield to the Barnstaple run. The Tarka Trail runs along the estuary from Bideford to Barnstaple, which provided a nice level and easy roue to follow. I did a quick estimate on Google Earth of the distance to the start of the run - looked to be about 10-11 miles. 

A timely update email from Sam reminded me why I was getting up at 6:45 on a Saturday morning and made sure that I resisted the temptation to turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. I had aimed to set off at 7.15, although that ended up being 7.20 in the end. I had a little bit of trouble initially with the bridge crossing the river not actually having a pavement, and then locating an access point to the trail, with a bit of road-running along a fast country road! Once I got onto the old track-bed it was straightforward, although it soon became clear that I had left it a bit late and was going to miss the start of the Parkrun. This meant that I pushed a bit harder than I'd have liked and upped the pace for a few kilometres. 

I made it to the start about 5 minutes after everybody had set off. It's a 2.5 lap course, so there was general confusion as I got lapped by the leaders whilst catching and passing the people towards the back. I logged easily my slowest Parkrun time, but quite enjoyed sauntering round. Whilst I waited to have my barcode scanned I managed to eat some food and then set off home. I was not so surprised when I started struggling at around 35km - this has happened before - and by the time I made it into Bideford (taking the longer route to cross a bridge with pedestrian facilities) I had run out of water and felt like it was probably best to call it a day. Fortunately Mum was free to pop down and pick me up! 

Overall I'm fairly pleased with that as a first long run. My feet are not too bad and my legs coped fine with a walk on the beach with the dog this afternoon. I also tried out my new Salomon running pack this morning, it has a much bigger capacity than my previous running vest, was fairly comfy for the whole run and I think has been a good investment.