My shortest race yet was the Stowmarket Golden Mile race on Saturday afternoon, being a mile through the main shopping street. Rightly or wrongly I did a 2km warm-up with some sprints about 50 minutes beforehand, this being the first time ever that my warm-up has been longer than the race. The entry was 300 […]
With a holiday of over a week in the USA planned, I wanted to do some running while I was there. The holiday started with a day in San Francisco, where there are some good running spots, but I was very tired from the long journey to get there, we had a packed day as […]
After an emotional rollercoaster of an evening at the World Athletics Championships in London last night, today it was time for my own athletic effort, the Great Yarmouth Half Marathon. It was a very well organised and incredibly friendly race thanks to the Great Yarmouth Road Runners – really friendly and helpful at race HQ, […]
So with venues 42 onwards now immortalised in this blog, I wondered what I could remember of the earlier locations – do they all merge into one or are they still distinct. With a fairly modest tally, I found I could mentally picture them all (Northampton caused some hesitation, but it soon came back to […]
Plans to visit Clacton parkrun with Claire were put on hold for several reasons, and so I decided to head north to avoid the rain, selecting Fritton Lake parkrun, between Beccles and Great Yarmouth. Located on a private estate used among other things for outdoor activities and woodland lodges, the signage on arrival was poor, […]
For those not in the know, parkrun tourism is the deliberate visiting of multiple parkrun locations, and has become a popular activity for growing number of parkrunners, with its own jargon. Part of my wandering was driven by an effort to visit less muddy locations in the winter than my home parkrun of Bury St […]
Before last year, going on holiday was generally reason not to be running, but with my commitment to run in more different locations, and to maintain fitness without the excuses of travel (leisure or business), that has changed. My runs while away from home may sometimes be shorter or easier, but hopefully most offer plenty […]
A visit this morning to Loughton (in Essex but for country bumpkins feeling like the NE edge of London) for the Roding Valley parkrun – my parkrun location 44. The run is around a park/recreation ground next to the eponymous river: flat and a mixture of grass and tarmac plus four bridges. Easy-going for a […]
My 43rd parkrun location was Hadleigh in Essex. I’d been here once before, in January, for the Legacy 10k on the Olympic mountain bike course, the hardest 10k I’ve done by some margin. The parkrun was easier, but still quite challenging. It starts off with a lot of downhill, initially with hairpin bends and then […]
This week’s runs have seen me on the Thames towpath just south of Oxford; from home to Drinkstone and back; knocking five minutes off my Thetford parkrun PB from two years ago; and then today’s big one. I was travelling to near Manchester, so I’d always thought that if the weather was good I might […]
The chunky entry fee for Sunday’s London 10 Mile run included “free” photographs. Most of my 18 are actually of other people entirely or I’m barely visible. But two are reasonable photos, at 5 and 10 miles… The official results put me in 1086th place (based on chip time), about 34% of the way through the […]
Today was the day that running training for the last 17 weeks has, at least nominally, been heading towards. Although I would have been going out running anyway, I’ve been working to an Mbition training plan with today’s London 10 Mile in Richmond Park (originally advertised as the Royal Parks 10) as the objective. I […]
Wednesday saw me realise that the need to drop the car off at the garage meant that the window for a run was short, so it was just a brisk 3.5km across the village and back rather than the intended 5 or 6km tempo run. Friday by contrast was planned to be short. Inspired by […]
The picture is at Languard Point, with the sea behind me, the exit of Harwich Harbour to the left, and shows a bit of the nature reserve, cluttered with the accumulated remains of several centuries of military defences and hemmed in by the Port of Felixstowe behind and the seaside world of leisure away to […]
This is me (in red, centre photo) enjoying Bury St Edmunds parkrun back in April, and at the time of writing still the banner photo for the event on Facebook. I’ve now done 72 parkruns. Volunteering is exactly that – voluntary – but nevertheless it is a truism that parkrun wouldn’t exist without volunteers, and […]