IT'S Ben Nevis.

This hill we're being cruelly forced to climb, it must be Ben Nevis.

Actually, Ben Nevis is a puny little mound compared to this hill.

This is Kilimanjaro without the giraffes roaming the plains round about.

Little by little, new parts of me start to ache and grumble, snap and throb. We reach the top of Kilimanjaro and there's a new peak above the mountain - some cruel joker has sat Mount Everest on top and we have to tackle that too.

I'm hallucinating now, thanks to the early start and the crushing fatigue.

This is awful, the worst experience imaginable. Will it never end?

"Get a grip," says my running buddy, "This was your idea."

He's right, it was my idea.

And this isn't Ben Nevis or a Tanzanian behemoth.

It's, er hem, Queen's Park and it's a wee bit hilly.

Parkrun is back after more than a year of pandemic cancellation and I have been sitting on my arse since last March.

That's not quite true - I've still been taking a weekly ballet class but it's a bit different to be moving in a two metre square box in my living room rather than travelling back and forth across a dance studio.

Like so many other people (there are more of us, right? Don't leave me hanging here) I've put on some lockdown blubber due to inactivity and the discovery of delivery services.

They bring the food you want right to your door and thank goodness no one told me sooner.

So, now restrictions have lifted, delivery order food is banned and I'm determined to improve my fitness levels.

Starting with parkrun.

Pre-pandemic I tried to go every Saturday morning. Running is not my favourite pastime but it does good things for a body's health and fitness in a relatively short space of time.

I've tried Couch to 5k apps - several of them - and have always heroically made it to the end of the course, vowing that now I can run 5k without stopping I'm going to run three 5ks a week.

No bother. How hard is it to carve out half an hour three times a week?

Well, it turns out to be impossible, actually, especially when your heart's not really in it.

And that's where parkrun comes in.

It's not really about the running. I'm sure for a great many people it's about the running, but for me it's about the camaraderie.

Every Saturday morning at 9.30am millions of people around the world gather in their local parks to encourage each other to do something good for themselves.

All of life is at your local parkrun: young and old; experienced and new; fit and fast run alongside the slow and determined.

After so long apart from other people, it was wonderful on Saturday morning to be back in a crowd of 3D human beings.

Charlie, the wee dog who runs the show, was present at the starting line to bark out his encouragement.

A young boy who routinely laps me every week was at least a foot taller and even fast than the last time I saw him.

There were a couple of new buggies holding new young faces as well as the old faces I've missed since last year.

I knew it was going to be bad as I laced up my running shoes but it was worse than my worst imaginings.

A pep talk and off we went. Queen's Park is hilly and the parkrun takes a three-peaks approach to the circuit - you run up a gentle incline, up a steep incline and then up a long and steep incline before pelting it down to the bottom of the hill and doing it twice again.

In the olden days I could run a 10k in sub-one hour. That's not much a boast but it was an achievement for me.

My 5k PB is probably about 28 or 29 minutes. I'm thinking I might be taking 35 or 36 minutes for my first time back in so long.

A woman pushing a buggy overtakes me never to be seen again. Another with a beautiful baby bump leaves me for dust.

I'm just starting lap number two when a volunteer yells to move over as the folk on their third lap need to get past. Third lap!

I'm very close to quitting and scuttling away through the park gates when a chap appears from behind a bench and shouts over: "Parkrun?"

"Yes," I wheeze back at him. He calls encouragement, he claps. I am encouraged and I start running again.

That's your parkrun, you see. No matter how much you feel like you can't go on, someone will have your back.

I do it, I finish the 5k. My time? Er... 41 minutes.

But there's no shame here as that's only going to improve. See you on Saturday?