We were treated to respite from the seemingly endless rain this morning, as a band of Claremont tourists finally rocked up at a fog-shrouded Ushaw Historic House in County Durham. ‘The curse’ had only scuppered one previous attempt at visiting this still fresh event (#14 today), and we huddled around in front of the imposing, eponymous house to listen to the friendly and informative briefing. We learned that we would be using the alternative course, due to the recent weather making the muddier sections of the main route impassable.
What followed was a fairly picturesque but compact 3-lap route, that wound around a small part of the gardens adjacent to the house, taking in a pond (“now a lake”) trees, and many, many u-turns. By my count there were three of these per lap, meaning at least nine hard-stop, 180 degree turns, but the mainly tarmac/gravel paths meant there wasn’t too much danger of slipping. The various switchbacks, which also saw us run directly past the house a couple of times each lap, made it easy for us to call out support to each other.
Despite the twisting, turning nature of the course, there were a couple of impressive results from our number. Mark Flynn ran his fastest ever parkrun (though he’s admittedly been tearing it up elsewhere since he last did one) and Lena Lou only came short of last week’s parkrun PB by a few seconds, balancing it out with her first ever 1st lady finish! Lucy Ward, our only non-debutant, claimed a course PB on her return.
The incredibly jovial run director helpfully fetched the sign from round the side of the house for our obligatory group photo, and then gave us a handy tip off about there being a larger space in the back area of the café, that would be particularly suitable for a large club group! A word to the wise, there is an overflow car park for Ushaw, but I would recommend going to the main one unless you have particular reason to believe it may be full. The alternative turned out to be 2km away from the parkrun, meaning Dave, Tara and myself enjoyed a brief, muddy jog back to the community centre in the charmingly named Bearpark.
Other notable tourism this week found Ryan Thompson running a course PB at the similarly nascent Elemore Park, Zoë Jukes at Hillsborough in Sheffield, and Silvia Velastegui-Cortez furthest afield at Finsbury Park in London. Several Claremonters turned out at the usual local haunts of Jesmond Dene and Leazes, Yana Bevan earning a course PB and Till Weber a parkrun PB (only his second outing) at the latter.
