Which comes first - the motivation or the reward?

Reward Running is a monthly competition designed to encourage your running motivation. At the end of each month, the runner who improves their runbritain handicap the most in that month is rewared with an adidas miCoach and the rest of the top 10 a set of Sennheisher headphones.

The competition runs from March to November each year and we recently rewarded those with the best improvements for March 2013. For some, these rewards help with motivaton but for our top runner in March, John Hayes, although the reward was very welcome, it hadn't been the driving motivatonal force. John  topped the leaderboard by improving his handicap score by more than 10 points. We asked him how he reduced his 5k time by more than 7 minutes at the Black Park and Wycombe Rye parkruns!

"The main motivation to get back into running was to stay fit, with the arrival of our first baby in December, I had spent less time than I would have liked down the gym or out running. The parkruns seemed like the ideal way to keep motivated to get out and run, with the added advantage, that it's close to home and a relatively short distance, which meant I was out for only 45 mins.

It was a slow start in February to get back into it after a few months out, but after some training tips from the runbritain website and running 3 - 4 times a week, my  fitness levels started to get back to normal. I was still surprised with my PB in the last race of March, as I had really struggled to get under 19 minutes in the previous races, not sure where 18:26 came from. The goal now has to be to get under 18!"

Wherever you find your running motivation we are here to help. Make sure you signed up for Reward Running so that your April races count and then turn to our Sennheiser Training Zone for top tips on how to bring those times and handicap scores down. If, like John, you are aiming to reduce your parkrun time each week you will find schedules to help you in our runfurther and runfaster sections.