My first parkrun with my heart rate monitor and it was a hot and sunny one. The guys from Running With Us were here to run a Run Bristol training session afterwards (made free at the last minute, but I had made other plans by then anyway) and there were pacers for 20min, 22min, 25min and 30min. I stayed not far off the 22min pacer until we hit the first hill then as usual I started to go backwards, but looking back at the heart rate data my heart reached a level and pretty much stayed there, increasing a little as the distance went on and peaking when I sprinted for the line at the end. After the turn and on the plateau on the way back down I found the 25min pacer on my shoulder so figured I needed to kick on a bit, and I made it back just under 24mins. It was interesting to compare the distance registered by the GPS to the distance the vivofit thought I’d completed: 4.99km for the GPS and 4.73km for the vivofit (which I didn’t turn off until after I’d been scanned). I shall have to see if I can set my stride length for when I am running.

I finished 79th out of 253 parkrunners, was 8th lady and 1st in my age category (this getting older isn’t so bad, I’d have been 4th in my old age category). Up to 8th in the points table.