From 800m to 5K: My First 8 Months of Parkrun
After that first 40:43 — walking almost the entire 5km — I didn’t have any grand plan. I just kept showing up on Saturday mornings, telling myself I only needed to beat last week’s time by a little.
A few weeks in, I met someone who changed how I thought about all of this. He was already running half marathons, comfortably doing 10 to 15km most weeks. He told me he used to be a gym regular — mostly weights — but kept getting injured, and when running started picking up around him, he decided to give it a try instead. It stuck.
We started meeting most weeks after Parkrun for coffee. Some of it was just talking about life, which was its own kind of good. But a lot of it turned out to be exactly the advice a beginner like me needed. His single most repeated piece of advice was almost annoyingly simple: just get out there, even slowly, and build the habit of showing up and covering distance. Don’t worry about pace, don’t worry about form, don’t worry about anything except turning up and moving. Everything else, he said, comes later — and only after that habit is actually in place.
He’d also send updates in our group chat during the week — a shoe sale here, an upcoming local race there, or just a small habit that had helped him early on. Nothing overwhelming, and always pitched at whatever level I was actually at, not where I wished I was.
One of the first things he picked up on: I wasn’t even wearing running shoes. I’d been showing up in a pair of fashion sneakers, which explains a lot in hindsight. He and a couple of others in the group pointed me toward proper running shoes, and that alone made a noticeable difference in how my legs felt after each session.
Slowly, the numbers started moving. I don’t remember every single week, but I remember the shape of it — fewer walking breaks, then no walking breaks, then being able to hold a pace I couldn’t have imagined in January. By the eight-month mark, I ran the full 5km without stopping to walk once.
Looking back, his advice about just building the habit first was probably the single most useful thing anyone told me in that whole stretch. It wasn’t about running faster or further right away — it was about making Saturday mornings a fixture, something I did rather than something I thought about doing. The speed and distance came on their own, eventually, once that part was solid.