Injured and inaugural

This post is nearly a month in the making, as you'll read it has been a busy few weeks. I've tried to update some of the references, but some of the context might be all over the place!

What a couple of weeks. Hard work, immense pride, emotionally and physically draining. Despite this I wouldn't have changed anything, well apart from the extended break from running aspect.

Injured

After establishing the week previously that I have a groin strain, it was time to hop on to physio table and start the healing process. It appears likely that since the original strain in August I've more than likely recovered and reinjured myself on multiple occasions. Of course I should have just asked my physio for his opinion back in the autumn, but the desire to keep running, presume it was something else, not face up to reality are all symptoms this runner suffers from.
Stupidly, I'd taken a lot of time off at the end of 2014 and didn't think to try and get it sorted then, mainly because the issue had appeared to have gone away. Muppet.
The way to treat muscular injuries like this is to break them down, effectively make them worse, then follow with ice and stretching, a bit of massage. Having mocked my lseee brother for suggesting that his "I have a groin strain" was a horrendous chat up line / excuse not to play cricket previously, I now found myself with the same injury! The massage and manipulation on the treatment table wasn't a pleasant experience, sure plantar fasciitis was more concentrated, but this was right up there!
After the first session on Tuesday 17th week, what I probably didn't need was my new driveway, in the form of two tonnes of aggregate arriving on Wednesday morning. My lack of skill at DIY is well documented, the air ambulance usually hovers above Stansted in anticipation whenever I approach a toolbox. Here I had to lay some membrane, kind of secure it and then try to shift all of the gravel onto the new area, freeing up the rest of the drive so it could be used in the evening.
By 5pm I was completely exhausted from my exploits, tendonitis flaring up once more in my wrist, legs killing, back groaning. I ran a bath and chucked some WWE Network on the iPad. Suddenly it was nearly half six. I don't think was a reflection on the Saturday Night's Main Event from 87 I was watching, more a statement on how knackered I was. Screwing up the wrist once more meant not being able to achieve much more in the form of diy for the remainder of the week.
I was back on the physio table to end the week. Because the muscle had been broken down to be worked on it was even more tender the second time around. Progress appeared to be being made though, for once I was actually making good on my promise, stretching and icing regularly.
By my next Friday appointment the extra work had paid dividends and my physio was very happy with the results. At this point I have one more session booked and it looks like I'll be making a return to running over the Easter weekend. In terms of marathon training it has probably set me back all of a week, having spread a 24 week plan over 28 weeks I can absorb the extra rest period with ease.
I'm glad that I finally got the injury checked over. At the same time I'm annoyed with myself for not consulting my physio sooner. I'd concentrated on some of the side effects thinking they were the issue and put myself through it over the past few months. Moving on from this the need to do something other than running has been highlighted. I need to cross train and to build up some strength. I'm too susceptible to injury at the moment, not a good sign leading into my first marathon!

The Inaugural

It's taken so long to put this together that we've now completed two weeks (now four!) of parkrun at the Forest.
The week of annual leave before the inaugural was perfectly timed. It gave me plenty of time to address any issues over the pilot weekend and make adjustments ahead of the full launch. By Friday I found myself in an almost zen like state of calm. By treating the pilot like a full event, all of the preparation had taken place. I had a nice long list of people to thank written, got the all important cake and bubbly sorted for the volunteers. During the week I'd taken delivery of what appeared to be the world's biggest megaphone, no one would be missing any of our briefings!!
After the previously discussed physio session I headed over to the forest to meet with Simon from the NT and Gerry, our parkrun ambassador. We ran through final details, including the opening of Elgin's car park, a last minute addition thanks to improved conditions that alleviated any venue capacity concerns. Gerry and I then walked the winter route, the forest was almost perfect, bathed in early spring sunshine, t-shirt weather almost! It was a great opportunity to chat all things parkrun and enjoy the surroundings. We enjoyed a drink overlooking the lake and I realised that in seven months of planning this was the first occasion where I was just relaxing and taking in the surroundings.
I was soon back home, putting finishing touches to the kit, preparing checklists for the morning and more importantly, getting a joint of pork in the slow cooker for a Friday night feast.
Sean, the first person to introduce me to parkrun headed up to Stansted in the evening. He'd be running the inaugural, but not until I'd got some pre and post volunteering roles sorted for him! Throughout the evening I was expecting a last minute pseudo panic attack to kick in, yet I continued to be serenely calm, potential added by some Erdinger and Blue Moon!
Perhaps the panic would instead occur during a night of fitful sleep? Apparently not as at 0535 I was up and awake, ready to take on the world (or more appropriately a Forest). I'm sure the reason I wanted a local parkrun was to allow for a Saturday lie in. Instead I appear to have committed to even less rest!
That said, I'm not complaining, arriving at the Forest at 0700 to unlock (how weird is that? Keys to the forest) felt great, as did handing each of the core team a personalised parkrun t-shirt each. Enough sentiment for now though, we had a parkrun to setup. We'd already taken on Gerry's feedback from the pilot to make use of a Volunteer Coordinator to ease the pressure on the Run Director. The change was noticeable straight away as I had the marshals report to Karl instead of me, freeing me to work with the technical roles.

Last minute sign adjustments

I'd enlarged the roster for the first week and called in friends and family to assist, meaning we had every role filled. Fergie from Oak Hill and Team Um Bongo landed at Heathrow at 0600 and gunned it round the M25 to marshal for us. Berlin comrade from Um Bongo Joely was on marshal, scanner and photography duty. My Um Bongoing brother in law Alec got to run, but as the tail! My Larmer colleagues Emily & Paul kept me sane, looked after some car parking, token support and scanning roles. Paula brought the camera to combine marshalling, photography and then some scanning. If any friend made the mistake to mention they had a free Saturday morning then they were getting roped into the launch event! My Endure 24 Team Um Bongo team mates had been well briefed as the date had been pencilled in since the start of the year. My own brief spurt of tourism was a nod to the impending start date and the likelihood of less touring in the months that follow. As it stands my first Saturday off will be in May as I head to the south coast (via a parkrun) to celebrate my Grandma's 100th birthday.
My parkrun mentor Len from Notley was on hand with his wife Paula to take plenty of photos (nearly 1500 before quality control) and Gerry our ambassador was confident enough in us to run and let us get on with it. Simon from the NT was also running, keeping an eye on things from afar.

Len was reluctant to take a lanyard!

Paul and Sam got on with setting the course up, Karl and I looked after our marshals and technical roles, apart from an absence of runners everything was running like clockwork! I was aware of the time throughout, our runners would be underway as close to nine as we could allow. A manager at work once described me as having a swan like demeanour during a project, calm exterior but probably kicking like anything underneath the surface to keep everything together. I'm not sure what I was outwardly portraying but mentally I was pinballing between calmness and panic, surely we had forgotten something.
Suddenly it was quarter to nine and time to make a start on the briefings. Paul was in charge of the first timers briefing. I planned to hover, but as a huge crowd descended on him I appeared at his side to offer assurance, and usage of the mega megaphone. Normally you see a dozen folk at a first timers briefing, this was completely different. I was hoping to move from the new runners briefing straight into the main introduction. Unfortunately the juniors were whisked away for a club warm up, so there I was, megaphone in hand, perched on a mini stepladder with no one to talk to!

We created a new volunteer position - Megaphone support

Once I called the runners forward we were then greeted with a car or two entering the car park so it was time for crowd management and sweeping the runners out of the way. I had a mere page of thank yous to get through before the main briefing, but with drizzle swirling around it was more important to get to the important parts of the notices and get the runners underway.
In the nervousness of it all I even forgot to get everyone to wave across to capture an inaugural photo. I at least managed to get 3, 2 & 1 in order and our first ever parkrun event at the Forest was soon underway.

Pre Run briefing at the inaugural

We then had fifteen minutes to get the finish area setup and our funnel team in position. The nature of our one lap course means that we can double up some marshal positions with secondary technical roles, so marshals were soon on their way back, ready to take up scanning or clipboard positions. The time between the start of the event & the first finisher appeared to fly by & perennial Essex inaugural course record holder Malcolm Muir dropped a sub 17 time! After 30 more minutes Alec was crossing the line as tail runner, arm in arm with Bernd & Cheryl at the back of the pack. I hovered around the funnel & finish area, a sense of pride and satisfaction taking over as runners crossed the line with smiles.
The majority enjoyed themselves and we got lots of feedback, both good & bad on the course, how the event was managed, marshal positions etc. Trying to make yourself available is an art I'm still learning, in reality just being around the finish area is all I needed to do, people were seeking me out. In all honesty, the most appropriate emotion might be overwhelmed. The sheer volume of people, anxieties about how well it will go, making yourself available to everyone, trying to catch moments of calm, it really was quite overwhelming.
By half ten we'd mostly packed up the course, before processing the results we took a moment to share some bubbly and cakes with our volunteers. The sun had finally come out, typically as all of the runners had gone home and it was nice to spend a brief couple of minutes to relax and enjoy the occasion. Simon from the NT was happy, Gerry was also happy, the whole team appeared to be buzzing, grins across all of their faces. We'd done it, well nearly done it.

Enjoying some bubbly with our inaugural volunteers

Drinks over with, it was time to wrestle with the results. Around ten of us huddled around a tiny laptop, with an intermittent internet connection to deal with. We had one funnel ducker that we were aware of so inserted a line into the results at around the time we knew it had happened, everything else looked good, so the results were confirmed & the parkrun supercomputers were soon churning away & emailing them out.

Results processing - Lesson One: Go to the toilet before you start!

Breathe. The run aspect of the weekend was now done. All that needed to follow was to process the photos (Len & Paula had taken 1500 between them), write the run report & try to avoid the phone as endless notifications would follow! I got home and dished out the bacon sandwiches, finally there was a moment to reflect on how the event had gone. Sean was full of praise, Len had commented that the hard work beforehand had paid off. It was barely midday and I was exhausted. Half five starts are easy, it is what I do during the week anyway, but the cumulative effect had me really wanting a mid afternoon nap!

Gerry, myself & Simon.

After some decent food and a bath I treated myself to an early night. I could sleep all the way through to lunchtime I suspected. How wrong I was. From around four am my mind was awake, buzzing at how the day had gone. For the next couple of hours I tried to sleep, it was a fruitless exercise, my mind was completely awake with ideas for the run report, week 2, anything but rest. So at around six I headed down stairs and made a start on the run report. It turned into a bit of an epic that took nearly the day to write. Len's photos arrived mid afternoon & that created another tidal wave of social media activity, so I held off until the evening to publish the report.
We had *just* 188 runners. Leading up to the event we'd played down the launch as much as possible. This is difficult when we had a large social media following from the interest group and fundraising events. Throughout the week I'd prepared everything for 300 runners, but we'd need some luck to go our way to not get near that. Thankfully HQ had also decided to launch Maidenhead on the same day, a similar distance out of London. Another London centric launch was something I was hoping for as despite the advice from HQ, many will still visit Event #1. I'd made appeals to the parkrun tourist community to stay away until our summer route was available, also citing that we expected to not have the summer car parks open.
The tone down efforts had included asking prominent Twitter & Facebook accounts to remove any references to our launch & requests to our local press for no coverage beforehand. We kept our social media posts to information about parking, facilities and introductions to the core team. Despite all this, how many would attend on the day was completely out of our hands. On the Friday Gerry & I had met up with Simon from the NT to run through final plans & then we walked the course. We'd had some good weather so Elgin's 600 space grass car park would be available, at least we'd be able to cope should all of parkrun descend on us.
A glance towards Maidenhead's attendance gave me a wry smile, they saw just over 300 runners, of that field a huge number of experience parkrunners & 88 complete parkrun debutants. Of our 188, 101 made their parkrun debut, nearly 60% of our runners! That number still surprises me, with Harlow, Great Notley, Cambridge & Chelmsford so close, there were still new parkrunners to find! Regular readers will know I'm a huge fan of parkrun tourism, I'm just relieved that our efforts to tone down the launch worked and our event was one that Tubbs and Edward from the League of Gentlemen would approve of!

A local event for local people? Tubbs & Edward certainly enjoyed it

Week 2 felt like another debut, all of our travelling volunteers would not be there, this was the first proper test of us as a team. I'd expected attendance to halve, but 120 joined us. Many that ran at the inaugural tried their hands at volunteering. By week 3 & 4 I felt like we'd settled into the event. I was glad that the rota design had given me four weeks to get my head around how the event should run, as it has allowed me to give stronger guidance to the rest of my team.

Event 3 - Made it onto the second step

The guys in the core team really have been amazing, they've had to contend with my at times crazy ideas and have had the faith to see them through, using their time in different roles to make further notes and contributions. Last week the four of us enjoyed some Mexican food round at my house as I walked them through the IT side of parkrun. The shared enthusiasm tells me that the event will do just fine. In just four weeks there has been a huge amount of evolution as ideas and processes start to come together.

By week 4 we were discussing funnel dynamics

I find myself trying to adopt the policy of being gracious and accepting of positive feedback and thank you's, but also being analytical with bad feedback, looking to how we can do things better. It would be all too easy to be dismissive of negatives and justifying it by pointing to all the positive responses, but in truth you can learn more from failure than you ever will from success. Any criticism is an opportunity for us to do better & my job as an Event Director is to take the emotional reaction out of any negatives and look to how we can improve.

The Conclusion

As my fourth week of Run Directing has come to an end and I hand over the reins I can look back on a very enjoyable month. By the time I got round to finishing this I'd actually made a return to running, but I'll add that into another blog. The smiles and thank you's from complete strangers provided vindication that setting up an event at the forest was the right thing to do. Seven months of hard work and emotional investment in a project that at times was a distraction, but at other times exactly what I needed to take focus away from other things going on in life. Just a month in and I'm finding myself recognising people, learning names and enjoying seeing the enjoyment others are getting from the event.

Getting quite good at randomly pointing

After a month I'm starting to get used to the role of Event Director, which might sound strange as I've been doing it since August. But from August to March all of the work was behind the scenes, we surfaced in January for the fundraiser, but everything else has been planning and preparation. I'm becoming more comfortable with the social aspect of parkrun, with every week making myself more available and chatting to more of our runners. I'm not going to transform from the socially awkward and rather direct engineer overnight, but I'm pleasantly surprised with how much I've enjoyed it so far. Everything Len & Gerry had told me is true, as an ED you get to see the pleasure others get from parkrun.

How this all started.....

To think that a year ago I'd not even volunteered yet! The moral of this story is, be careful who you send tweets to.