My 52nd parkrun location for this morning was an icy Druridge Bay, the most northerly parkrun in England while we were spending a weekend in Northumberland. While I was waiting in the cold and then running, Lucy took the dogs for a walk along the beach and found a couple of geocaches. The route is […]
After doing my home parkrun last weekend, this morning’s exploration took me to Brundall, just east of Norwich for my 84th parkrun at my 51st different course. It’s a fairly new “countryside park”, and on the small side as these things go, so despite a route looping back on itself, it was still four laps […]
My 50th different parkrun location today was Castle Park parkrun, in Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire. A very pleasant trot around the park with views of a second motte-and-bailey castle (after last week’s Clare Castle) and the infant River Stort, cheered on by a good few spectators including Lucy and two of our dogs, en route […]
Clare Castle parkrun in SW Suffolk today for my parkrun tourism. It was just its fourth run, and so had been my nearest not visited. The run here allowed me to complete the Suffolk parkruns once again. The route is around the country park, a spot I’ve been to a number of times, with the […]
More parkrun tourism for me today: parkrun #80 at location #48 was Southend, joining a couple of friends, one of whom lives in nextdoor Leigh. The course is very pleasant, being three laps of Gunners Park, itself part of a larger nature reserve formed from former military use as its name hints. It includes three […]
A visit to March in Cambridgeshire this morning for parkrun #79 at my 47th location. After a warm-up jog, I quickly got chatting to people – it rapidly became clear that it is a particularly friendly event with a lot of mutual support going on for the full range of abilities. The route is four […]
It was bright and sunny when I left the house, but started raining heavily once in Norfolk, and it was a gloomy scene when I reached the puddle-strewn car park on the edge of the common at Mulbarton just south of Norwich. I waited in the car for a while, and the rain turned to […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
Encouragement and magic gingerbread from friends helped me find the energy to get out of bed in good time rather than lie there listening to the rain. I headed down the M6 with the wipers on storm, wondering if it was a good idea, but by the time I reached Preston the rain had stopped […]
I started running indoors in late 2007, and after reaching 5km indoors in March 2008, started outdoor running, and entered the first Royal Parks Half Marathon in October 2008. I did two more half-marathons in Reading in 2009 and 2010, after which my running rather lost objective and focus. In 2014, I discovered parkrun, which […]