Cross-country was back this weekend, but we still had a few people out parkrunning around the north-east.
Slightly further away though, Maria Dueñas has obviously left to join the Claremont splinter group in Australia, and having finally managed to get there, she celebrated her new home with a parkrun at Cottesloe beach near Perth.
Ann Smith was on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales at Fountains Abbey, which she described as “beautiful, even in the rain”. Anyone who has been to this parkrun has reported back on it being one of the most visually stunning around, which makes it a must-do for any discerning parkrun tourist.
Nikki Szlovák is sensibly working her way back slowly from injury, but still managed to finish as 2nd lady at Riverside. Over on the coast, lesser-spotted Claremonter Simon Lowe ran his first post-pandemic parkrun at South Shields, earning a course PB.
A number of us were volunteering at Leazes, where several of the Town Moor Juniors team showed up with cake to celebrate the birthday of one of their run directors, Louise. This meant some of us got to indulge in cake both pre and post cross-country, the jury is out as to what impact this had on performance… Jason Tipples continues to show both great improvement and consistency, running sub-20 once again, just 4 seconds shy of his PB. New member Niamh Garratt, after breaking her Newcastle parkrun duck at Town Moor recently, made her Leazes debut, the “first of hopefully many.”
While scanning, I commented on a man’s extremely low barcode number (only 4 digits!), and he claimed to have been at the 4th ever parkrun back in 2004!
