Dark / dimly lit park, no music, app that tells you there are zombies after you, all combined with a good imagination, made my first run for 3 weeks a scarier experience than I first anticipated.
I realise I am slightly late to the party with the Zombies, Run! app and that 1000s of people are already using it and have been for ages, but that doesn’t make it any less fun! Just in case anyone hasn’t heard if it, the app runs like a computer game where you go on missions and such like to find supplies and defend your little town against zombies. You earn supplies and building materials which you can use to build stuff for your town and repair it after attacks. The main difference from most computer games is that the missions you go on are actual running missions, you earn things by running in real life! It is fun and adds a new dimension to running 🙂

As I previously mentioned, this was my first run for 3 weeks, and it was much better than I expected. I ran more than I expected to, managed to avoid painful calves and actually enjoyed myself. My pace was really slow, but not too bad for the first run for a while, and not too bad considering I was running in the dark, in a park 2/3 of which is either not lit or only lit by light spillage from near by roads.
I discovered a couple of things during this run too…1) when forced to, by forgetting to download any to my new phone, I can run without music…this is a step forward for me 🙂 b) when people in your ears are telling you there are zombies after you, it is dark and you are surrounded by hedges, you can make yourself believe it quite easily! 3) teenagers dressed in black loom up in a dark park, but are actually not generally zombies after all.

The other thing I discovered is that the “moves” app which  tracks your movement and such can actually tell when you are running and when you are walking…so now I have a way of knowing when I do which one even when I don’t set up intervals 😀

Look! 6 mins I did a run of 6 mins on my first run back after 3 weeks…I didn’t expect that! (ok I walked quite a bit too, but that is totally not the point!) I would also like to point out that some of the initial 7 min walk was actually me standing trying to figure out where all my music had gone… (new phone fail)

So all in all I am pretty pleased with this, and I am even more pleased that I found the motivation to run again after a 3 week break and in the dark, traditionally these things are good at putting me off the running 🙂

So in a vaguely terrifying zombie avoiding sort of way, Day 168 Complete 😀