Marathons are bad for parkrun relationships
Earlier this year I was training for the Belfast marathon. I was doing 5k runs with a weighted vest, and I was going for longer runs of about 12 miles without the vest.
I got my parkrun time way down to 22 minutes.
Around about this time, a girl I liked from the gym started doing the parkrun. There was a mutual attraction at the beginning, glances exchanged here and there.
My local parkrun is two laps of the park, so each lap is about 2.5k. For a few weeks, she and I did the same thing. . . we ran side by side for the 1st lap, and then I would run ahead and typically finish about 115 seconds ahead of her.
So then I ran the Belfast marathon in May, the whole 26 miles. I don't know what this did to me (both my mind and my body) but I've never been able to run the same way since.
This morning I showed up for the parkrun proudly wearing my new "50" tshirt that arrived in the post last week. She was there, and before the run started, she made eye contact with me for a few seconds before we started to run.
So we ran the 1st lap side by side. Trying to keep up with her, I went from breathing loudly, to breathing hoarsely, and then finally to breathing like you only hear from a very fake lesbian porno with names like Crystal and Chantelle.
It came to the 2nd lap and she then ran ahead of me. She finished 4 minutes ahead of me.
So then afterward I tried to ask her out. I found her body language encouraging and so I waited for her to finish up chatting to another lady. I got about three syllables of my sentence out before she answered with a very abrupt 'no', and then got into her friend's car and drove off.
Moral of the story: Choose a marathon or choose a wife and kids. You can't have both.
