Sun 16Long run, outdoors40 to 45 min, 9 run / 1 walk. Roughly 6.5 to 7 km at about 7:00/km. The one session this week that changes anything.
Mon 17rest
Tue 18Easy 30 minOutdoors, same 9 / 1 rhythm. Keeping my legs turning over, nothing more.
Wed 19rest
Thu 20Shakeout, 20 minVery gentle. I cut it short or skip it if it feels like effort.
Fri 21restKit out, start time checked, water on.
Sat 22Bellahouston 10KTwo laps of the park. First one should feel too easy.
Pace band9 run / 1 walk · target 70 min
Clock
Doing
Roughly at
0:00 to 9:00
Run
1.4 km
9:00 to 10:00
walk
10:00 to 19:00
Run
2.9 km
19:00 to 20:00
walk
20:00 to 29:00
Run
4.3 km
29:00 to 30:00
walk
30:00 to 39:00
Run
5.8 km 5K around 35:00
39:00 to 40:00
walk
40:00 to 49:00
Run
7.2 km
49:00 to 50:00
walk
50:00 to 59:00
Run
8.7 km
59:00 to 60:00
walk
60:00 onwards
Run it in
10 km
I take the first walk break at 9 minutes even though I will not want to.
I walk briskly. I do not stop, and I start running the second the minute is up.
If 9 minutes feels long on the second lap, I drop to 5 run / 1 walk and keep going.
If the phone failsno audio cues · course signs only
2km
4km
6km
8km
I walk for one minute after each of these markers. Four breaks, read off the course signage.
Two laps of the same 5 km loop, so the 6 km break is at the sign marked 1 km on my second lap, and the 8 km break is at the sign marked 3 km. Worth working out which physical signs those are before the start.
A walk minute that runs to seventy seconds costs me nothing.
Between breaks I run at whatever feels conversational.
From the 8 km break I run the last 2 km all the way in.
I signed up for the Bellahouston Park 10K this evening, and I regretted it almost immediately.
It wasn’t my idea. Stephanie talked me into it0, though I won’t pretend the bespoke finisher’s medal didn’t help. I’ve never had a running medal before, and there’s something almost embarrassing about how effective that turned out to be as an incentive.
Her reasoning went something like this: I’m not going to run it in fifty minutes, or even an hour, so there’s no point going in with any real expectations. But that’s exactly what makes it useful. It’s a fixed point on the calendar, a number I can look back at in a year and measure everything else against. Not a race to win, just a race to have run.
I’m seven weeks into Couch to 5K. Last week I ran my fastest ever Linwood parkrun, 29:15, a proper PB and comfortably inside the 30-minute 5K target I set myself. That’s the good news. The less good news is that Bellahouston Park is a 10K, on the 22nd of August, and I’ve still got two weeks of Couch to 5K left to run. The race lands right as I finish the programme, not after it.
Couch to 5KWeek 7
✓Day 1completed
✓Day 2completed
✓Day 3completed
WEEK 7 COMPLETE
So the honest arithmetic looks like this: double a 29:15 5K and you get somewhere near 58 minutes for 10K, if pace held perfectly over double the distance, which it never does. Distance takes more out of you than a calculator thinks it will, and I’m still closer to the start of a training plan than the middle of one. An hour is not a sensible target for the 22nd of August. It might not even be a realistic one.
But that’s sort of the point, and it’s why I said yes even while I was regretting it. This whole year is built around one number: a sub-50-minute Paisley 10K, twelve months from now. I’ve written before about starting that plan from a standing stop, and about the parkrun that turned into an unplanned checkpoint along the way. Bellahouston is the first time the plan has been tested against the actual distance rather than a fraction of it. It’s not a rehearsal I chose for myself. It got handed to me, earlier than I’d have picked, at a stage of training where I have no business expecting a good time.
And that’s exactly why it’s a benchmark and not a race. A benchmark only tells you anything if the first reading is allowed to be a bit rough. If I waited until I felt ready to run a 10K, I’d never get a number down early enough for it to mean anything later. Stephanie’s version of that idea was kinder than mine, when I put it that way to her, she pushed back: “Yeah but can we make it a wee bit more positive? My thought process wasn’t that you were going to be fabulous, you have done really well but this is to see how far you will go.” She wasn’t wrong, and it’s a better way of putting it than mine was. The value isn’t in the time on the day. It’s in having a time at all, from this exact point in the plan, to set against whatever I run in the months after.
The portico from the demolished Ibroxhill House, now standing in Bellahouston Park, where I’ll be running on the 22nd of August Photo: Rosser1954 Roger Griffith, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
So on the 22nd of August I’ll turn up at Bellahouston Park having just finished Couch to 5K, and run further than I’ve ever run in one go, at whatever pace that turns out to mean. I expect it to be slow, and probably uncomfortable somewhere around the seven or eight kilometre mark where the programme hasn’t taken me yet. I’m not signing up to do well. I’m signing up so that next summer, on the actual Paisley start line, I’ve got something honest to compare it to.
I’m still not entirely sure I should have said yes. But I think Stephanie was right to talk me into it anyway.
Lifting a piece of silken tofu out of the broth. Kare Burosu at Wagamama, Silverburn, Glasgow, July 2026. “Kare Burosu at Wagamama Silverburn” by Douglas Ireland, licensed CC BY 4.0.
That is me lifting a piece of silken tofu out of a bowl of Kare Burosu at Wagamama in Silverburn, and yes, I am posting a picture of my tea on the internet.
I do not have much in the way of social media. What I do have is this blog, and it turns out a blog does the job perfectly well. Anyone subscribed by RSS gets this popping up in their reader the same way a photo of somebody’s carbonara appears in a Facebook or Instagram feed. Same picture, same daft caption, no middleman.
Owning the feed
The difference is who is holding the steering wheel.
On the proprietary platforms, you do not get a feed, you get a feed that has been arranged for you. The order is decided by an algorithm, the ads are slotted in between your pals, and the whole thing is tuned to keep you scrolling rather than to show you what you actually asked to see. If you follow somebody, there is no guarantee you will see their posts. If you post something, there is no guarantee your followers will see it.
RSS is boring by comparison, and boring is the entire point. You subscribe to a site, you get everything that site publishes, in the order it was published, with nothing wedged in between. No ranking, no promoted posts, no “you might also like”. If you get sick of me you unsubscribe and I never find out, which is a much healthier arrangement than a follower count.
The other bit that matters is the archive. Everything I write lives at my own domain, in files I control, on hosting I pay for. Platforms change their rules, get sold, get shut down, or quietly decide your account is no longer worth keeping. This post will still be here at the same address in ten years because the only person who can take it down is me. That is worth more than reach.
So yep, this is my Instagram now. Get used to the food photos.
The scran
Kare Burosu is a lovely bit of cooking. Thick udon noodles in a golden curry broth, silken tofu, mushrooms, shredded carrot, coriander and a fair scattering of red chillies, and it is plant based from top to bottom. The broth is the star. It has that gentle coconut sweetness underneath and enough spice coming through to make you sit up.
The meal logged in Nourish, my own calorie counter. One portion, 706 kcal, 30g of plant based protein. “Kare Burosu logged in Nourish” by Douglas Ireland, licensed CC BY 4.0. Nutrition figures are Wagamama’s own published data.
Regular readers will know I am a recovering food addict. I have written about that properly over in I’ll Start Tomorrow, so I will not go over the whole thing again here, but the short version is that eating out used to be a guessing game I would rather not play.
This is where Wagamama deserve credit. Their website has the full nutrition for every dish on the menu, so I could sit down knowing exactly what I was ordering and log it properly afterwards in Nourish, my own calorie counter. 706 kcal, 30g of protein, and all of that protein plant based. Thirty grams from a bowl of noodles is not to be sniffed at.
Restaurants that publish their numbers make life enormously easier for anyone who tracks what they eat, for whatever reason. It costs them nothing and it means people like me can order confidently instead of picking the safest looking thing on the menu and hoping.
Double spicy
Kare Burosu is Stephanie’s dish. She has been ordering it for years and she is the reason I had it at all, because I looked at the menu, remembered how good hers always smells, and asked for the same. These last couple of years she has taken to lifting the chillies out before she starts, and last night they came across into my bowl. Her broth ended up pitched where she likes it, mine ended up with double the heat, and we both got the dinner we wanted out of it.
Reader, I loved it. Nose running, but I loved it.
A great evening out, a great bowl of noodles, and a picture of it posted somewhere I actually own.
