With Storm Amy doing its best to disrupt life across the country, many parkruns were cancelled for safety reasons. However it didn’t stop the monthly tourism trip to Alnwick, though with a smaller group than usual. Thankfully, a number of us who couldn’t make that trip still found somewhere to run, though, unsurprisingly, there were no PBs to report this Saturday.
The group who did make it to The Pastures experienced the ‘B’ course, but still had a practice for the cross-country later in the season, complete with stunning views of Alnwick Castle.
Gill Milne and I were down in Sheffield, meeting old friends and reliving our student days, so were very keen to sample the parkrun at Endcliffe Park, which was “our” park in those times. Obviously there was no parkrun back in the day, but, as Gill said “we wouldn’t have been up at 9am on a Saturday morning anyway!”. The heavy rain of the night before had subsided, and we were treated to a wonderful rainbow as we made our to the start. Looking around at the assembled throng, I was struck at how much younger the runners seemed to be compared to those at other parkruns, and the geek in me now wonders if anybody has done a parkrun age analysis. We see lists of the fastest and slowest, how about the youngest and oldest?
Anyway, I digress. Nursing a sore and swollen knee, I probably shouldn’t have been there at all, so I started near the back with the plan being to walk it, with possibly some very short jogs. The course is two main laps with a short loop to begin with, and it seemed that I had only just crossed the start line when the leaders were hurtling back along the same path, marshals frantically keeping the runners apart. Then on to the main laps, which were on a mix of tarmac paths and trails, through the wooded area alongside the River Porter, passed a pond, over the river and back again. There were two fairly extreme pinch points were we had to queue to cross in single file (at least on lap 1) – over the footbridge and where the path was narrowed by the presence of a large tree. It was a bit hairy at times as the fasties came hurtling past on the 2nd lap. I had been looking forward to this parkrun for months, but in the end I was just happy to finish, and happy that I had managed to jog for several stretches – though the downhill stretch was painful, even at a walk! A nice park, friendly marshals, but I think it is a parkrun that is a victim of its own success, as it has become too popular for the paths to cope with.
