Sunday 1 May 2016

Graduation Day! Spring 2016

Hello blog readers.

Well the day had come!  And to top of all the brilliant hard work that the PWR Beginners had done the sun had come out to shine on them! It was a perfect day!  I picked up Tracy and Jane, she is a PWR, coming along to support and encourage our beginners.  There were so many other PWR's there too, it's just as well it's not a mob match day! There were also our graduates family members coming down to support them, husbands, wives, kids!  Carole's son had come all the way from Brighton to run with with!  How cool is that!

The conversations and the buzz going around our group of over 30 graduates was just amazing.  All of them were so excited about being here, so amazed that they are about to run, some for the very first time, the whole of a 5k parkrun!  Just nine weeks back they all started from scratch.  Amazed that they had even got out of bed to even think about running for a 1 minute!  And now, 9 weeks later, all about to embark on a fabulous journey of running!  The possibilities are endless.  Races, 5k's and 10ks!  Lovely medals!  Then there are club Grand Prix races, these are fun.  When you are a part of PWR we have this club Grand Prix throughout the year.  Everyone can compete.  Especially with 11 groups, everyone has a great chance of winning a trophy! A Trophy!  Named and everything!

Ok, so running is not all about the bling and trophies, what it is about is...........well, it's different for everybody!  Everybody has their own personal agendas, feelings, thoughts, reasons, goals! And it's free! It's just simply amazing!

We had an attempt to warm up, I think everybody was just totally excited to really get into the whole warm up mode, we walked over to the pavilion where the loos are, were the finish funnel is and where the tea and cakes will be!  Most important to show that to our new first time parkrunners!

We walked over to the start, the winter route start, and our graduates were fully mingled with the rest of the 650 runners, and the excitement is rising all the time.  And then we were off!  The long straight, going down hill is our warm up!  Just nice and steady, just taking it gentle at first, we have 3.1 miles to run, something that some of our runners haven't yet done!

The crowds soon thinned out as the faster runners move on out leaving the rest of the field clear for us all to concentrate on doing this.  Our PWR members, all proudly wearing our club shirts today, so that the graduates could identify us and we could identify them as they all had stickers.  The faster graduates had pacers, the middle graduates had pacers and the slower graduates, but amoung all of those they had the rest of the park and the volunteers, all were cheering on every parkrunner!

I was running with Carole and her son Jordan, what an encouraging son he is!  All the way around he was giving positive encouragement to his mum!  You could see that he was totally proud of what she has done and what she is doing!  When were at the end of the second to last long straight I was starting to feel slightly sorry for myself!  In order to not to chase my PB and to be totally focused on our graduates I gave myself a handicap!  A bloomin goodnight out the night before!!  And I just started to 'feel it' along here!  But I kept going, if Carole was running then so was I!

That last bit of the straight down to the funnel, now that was something!  We had ran all the way, no walking, and no slowing down the pace, just nice and steady, it was just so darn exciting!  The parkrunners were all cheering us along.  The graduates that had finished were cheering us along, the PWR's were cheering, the marshals and volunteers!  It was simply amazing.  I was just getting so emosh, let me tell you.

I held back and Carole took the lead, "Come on Carole"  her son was ahead taking pictures, capturing the moment that she passed that 3.1k into the funnel!!!! Fantastic!  Brilliant!  We walked through and found the rest of our group and there were smiles, there tears and there were hugs all around!  We heard some more cheers as the rest of our graduates came through the funnel. More hugs, more tears! And, then there was cake!!!

Brilliant morning, brilliant graduates and I know we are going to have a few more members of a brilliant club!

Here is some pictures of the morning







Geeky stats.




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