Park ton

This post is ONLY ABOUT RUNNING. No flights, no booze. You have been warned!

Bushy parkrun start area

I ran my 100th parkrun this morning! Bit pleased with that. For them that don't know, parkrun is a free, weekly, timed 5km run at 9am every Saturday with the occasional Christmas or bonus bank holiday. There's loads of the bastards, all over the country and world; my local event happens to be the one which started it all - Bushy Park, Teddington, aka the cradle of parkrun - and it now regularly tops 1,000 participants. I've done 86 of my runs at Bushy, with the other 14 split between 11 events around London, England, and the world - my overseas exploits in Russia in Australia have already been written up. Already plotting how to reach one down in New Zealand.

When I first started, doing a 9am Saturday run had dual benefits: the run itself was a good way to lose weight and get fit, and the time put me off getting drunk on Fridays because I didn't want to miss them. But after a year or so I thought, hang on, I already don't particularly enjoy running itself - how much worse can it be with a hangover? Turns out, not much at all. And since then I've never pulled out of a run because of a hangover. Laziness, depression, holiday, work, sure, but never a hangover. Steve actually called me "champion hungover runner" once.

Proper parkrun weather.

Weather rarely puts me off either. In fact I prefer running in the cold, with a bit of rain. I've run in -6ºc, in deep snow,in cross-country style mud, through deep puddles. Heat is much worse. I'm glad parkrun in Australia is at 7am instead of 9am.

Aaaanyway. Making it to a hundred means I get a new (free!) shirt and jacket (maybe), emblazoned with the parkrun logo and a big fat 100 on the back. I never need to wear my 50 shirt again, I guess. But it also feels like a good time to do a bunch of pointless analysis and generate some stats porn. Hurrah for stats! My parkrun profile page has some but really not enough to satisfy me.

First, stuff I can't easily graph. Reaching 50 took 110 weeks, a milestone I hit on October 27th 2012. I immediately started to look toward when I might hit 100 and discovered that my 40th birthday falls on a Saturday, 87 weeks on from then. Obviously it became my target to reach the century on or by then - and making it today means that from 50 to 100 took 81 weeks. Achievement unlocked! And also obviously this means I've taken 191 weeks in total, so on average I get out just a bit more often than every other week. 191 weeks is roughly 3 years and 8 months.

The only day of a month I've not done a parkrun on is the 28th. My birthday is on a 28th. Huh.

Clearly, I've run 500km. For people who prefer other units of measurement, that's 310.86 miles, 59651.63 double decker buses or 4754.84 football pitches (thanks to this calculator).Practically, this means I could run to anywhere in Belgium, most of the Netherlands or Luxembourg, easily reach Paris and just about get to Hellfest outside of Nantes. I could almost get some kölsch in Cologne, but no haggis in Glasgow.

Now, graphs! I'm no statistician but I like the number of things you can tease out of 100 pieces of data with only 3 variables: location, date it occurred, and time it took. And google's graphing library sure makes them look prettier than I could ever do by myself (though some of the automatically chosen colours are a bit ropey).

Actually, not graphs quite yet. What a fucking tease, eh? Anyway, I can't easily embed them in this page so I've had to put them elsewhere - so first, some headlines before I send you on your way.

• Best time: 26:14; worst: 39:57; average: 29:46 (very happy to be below 30:00!)
• October is my favourite month, July and August my least favourite
• I managed a 5-Saturday month in March 2014
• There have been 5 months since my first run where I've not managed a parkrun at all. Lazy depressed Darren is lazy and depressed.
• My 30s are ending on a high

OK, so, now, graphs.

Huh. £68 for a day trip to Rome sounds like a decent way to tick off the Holy See...