Park Run and What Makes A Good Day

Which day is the best day?

It's a shiny new week so here's a shiny newsletter to go with it. It's also the first one back after last week's existential crisis and subsequent renewed resolve to write about whatever comes to mind. If you missed that one, and I CAN SEE FROM THE STATS that some of you did, you can read that here.

Before I get into the meat of the newsletter, a couple of shout-outs:

Shout-out #1: to everyone that didn't unsubscribe last week even after I dangled an unsubscribe button in your face. I'm impressed by your restraint. That said, I'm conscious that the people most likely to unsubscribe are probably the people that didn't open the email last week and probably won't open this one either. Joke's on them, I guess.

Shout-out #2: To those who read the web version of this newsletter after I bravely shared it with people I know in real life via my Instagram story. If you're here reading the browser version again, subscribe and get this same thing, but via email.

Anyway ⤵️

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What Makes a Good Day

Like everyone in the world, I've been having good days and bad days my whole life. The hallmarks of both are generally standard. Good days involve getting up at a time that's not too early and not too late, eating nice food. If it's a working day, you're nice and productive and nobody shouts at you and if it's a weekend, you might go to the pub, have a pint or two and maybe see a dog there. Bad days are the inverse - a groggy late start drains your energy, you might miss breakfast and then slog through to lunchtime without achieving very much at all. You never fully catch up with where you might have been had your day started better. By the evening, the day feels wasted.

So I've been thinking more about what makes a good day, a good day. Does getting up at the correct/planned time always result in a good day? Or is it about the first activity after getting up? Or is it about the day of the week? Probably. Which is the best of the week? What makes it the best day?

There are no good arguments for the best day of the week being Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Monday is obvious, Tuesday is a day of desolation with the whole week stretching out ahead of you. Wednesday is an improvement but it's more of a neutral day than making any real contribution to our lives, don't you think?

It's not Thursday. Thursdays are plagued with the regrets of Wednesday and the stomach flips produced by the recurring realisation that it is indeed Thursday and not Friday. Thursdays are for boring Europa League football and general elections that never go the right way. In short, Thursday I don't care about you. But Friday, I'm not in love with you either. Friday's got a big reputation but it's rarely a day of leisure. It’s only fun after 7pm. And I've never felt in love on a Friday. Good Friday is the only reliably good Friday.

Saturday. Now, here we are. Some people would say that Saturday is the predictable choice for the best day accolade. Perhaps it is. But you can't deny that it's the day that gives you the greatest chance of a good day. Any hospitality workers reading this will be rolling their eyes, probably emergency services personnel too, because for them, Saturday is the day of the devil himself. But lots of people aren't hospitality and emergency service workers and we have to go with majority opinion, don't we? Besides, on those sweet, luscious Saturdays when hospitality or emergency service workers are off work, they join the rest of society in a normal Saturday and inevitably, have a lovely day. Saturdays are for Premier League football, they're for sunny mornings in coffee shops, they're for walking around markets and going to that pub I mentioned earlier and smiling at those dogs I mentioned earlier. If you're still not convinced, consider this: Saturdays are so good, they had the UK's premier girlband of the 21st century named after them and spawned a national treasure in the now TV host Dame Rochelle Humes.

And to my main point - Saturdays are for Park Run. For those unaware, Park Run is a weekly running event held for free in parks around the world, every Saturday morning at 9am. It's a 5km distance which all participants can run, jog or walk around. No pressure, no judgment. In fact, the opposite, only encouragement and warm welcomes. I sometimes tout to the people around me and also to the good men of my Hinge feed, that I am indeed, what you call a 'Parkrunner'. This suggesting that I go regularly enough to Park Run for it to be a part of my innate identity. This is a lie.

I go to Park Run, sometimes. That isn't to say that I don't often set my running clothes out by my bed on a Friday night with full intention of waking up the next day, putting them straight on and heading out on my bike to Hackney Marshes. I always intend to be standing there at 08:55 on a Saturday morning, clapping the announcements of the chief Parkrunner that 'so and so is doing their 200th Parkrun today'. For all my good intentions, I often find myself in bed at 08:55 on a Saturday morning with a sore head from the Approach Tavern the night before and crucially devoid of a glass of water and two paracetamol.

I used to resent the fact that Park Run is held on a Saturday morning. 'Why don't they do two?', I used to ask. 'You could do one on Saturday and another on Sunday'. This was with the thinking that I would obviously always make the Sunday event without fail and to make it on a Saturday morning was just incompatible with my life. But no, my view has changed.

Park Run can only be held on a Saturday. The warm, fuzzy feeling you get after completing the 5km on a Saturday morning is not just the accomplishment of moving your body before lunchtime. It's Saturday. Park Run makes a Saturday and Saturday makes the Park Run. By 10am, most participants have filtered out of Hackney Marshes to continue with their Saturdays elsewhere. Who knows what other joys await them? To leave Hackney Marshes and head to a coffee shop or home to shower before heading out again to meet a friend at a museum? This is glorious. And while you could replicate this on Sunday to some degree, the lingering spectre of Monday and the woes of mid-pandemic late capitalism that await in the coming week would do too much to dampen the mood. Park Run wouldn't work on a Sunday in this climate. Instead, it takes place each Saturday, giving each of its participants the best possible start to the day and providing the impetus for them to go on and have a grand day from there. Go to Park Run next Saturday!

Finally, Sunday may be a day of rest, but ultimately, all that amounts to is a comedown from the joys of Saturday and a lingering mope for which the only brief respite is afforded by the Sunday roast dinner.

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That's all for Three-Quarters this week. I hope you had a nice time reading it, even though it wasn't about coffee. I will probably do one about coffee before the end of the year. In the meantime, comment, leave a like and/or tell your friends. The Substack algorithm is apparently very difficult to impress. Despite the recent barren run of newsletters, I’ll have a Christmas break and will be back on 3rd January! Have a great week!