Lakeside Loops
Urban parks have their charm, but this week I traded housing estates and football pitches for something a little more… aquatic. Holme Pierrepont, home of the National Watersports Centre, is essentially a giant man‑made lake with ideas above its station. Rowers glide across it. Kayakers skim along it. And on Saturday mornings, several hundred runners trot around it pretending it’s perfectly normal to do laps of an Olympic‑sized puddle. It was their 7th event on the day I went. They are quite new and they seem to have recovered well from their record-setting first day, when over 1200 people turned up.
It was an easy drive over, and my dad came along for the ride — not for the run, obviously. He made a beeline for the café while I went to join the 350‑ish runners gathering at the start. Numbers were apparently down a touch thanks to the shiny new parkrun on the Victoria Embankment, but “only” 350 still counts as busy in my book.
The Shape of the Lake
The course is simple: one big clockwise loop of the rowing lake. That’s it. No twists, no turns, no woodland detours, no surprise hills. Just a perfectly flat ring around a perfectly flat body of water. You can’t even joke about elevation because the lake, by definition, does not slope. If it did, the boats would all end up at one end. It’d be better for water skiing though (fnarr, fnarr).
It was a bright but cold morning, with a bit of a breeze. Not a “stiff” breeze though. More of a slightly unpleasant reminder of the presence of an atmosphere. The only real downside was the return leg, where the end of the lake appears to remain exactly the same distance away for an implausibly long time. It’s like running towards a mirage or trying to find the end of a rainbow.
The Running Bit
I trotted round in about 33 minutes again, which seems to be my current default setting. Not fast, not slow, just a steady, respectable plod that keeps everything ticking over. With so much space and such a flat course, it all felt very civilised — no elbows, no bottlenecks, no mud trying to steal your shoes.
Dad was still in the café when I finished. We didn’t hang around for breakfast though — I did a quick superhero‑style costume change in the toilets and we headed off to Meadow Lane for our lunchtime appointment.
Football and Feasting
Now, I’ve had some breakfasts in my time, but the spread at Meadow Lane was something else. A continental breakfast and a full English and a selection of “breakfast puddings”, which is a phrase I didn’t know existed but now fully support. If you can have breakfast wine on holiday, you can absolutely have breakfast pudding in Nottingham.
It was shaping up to be an excellent day… right up until Notts County lost. But apart from that minor detail, it really was top‑tier Saturdaying.
All Wrapped Up
A flat, friendly parkrun in a unique setting, a lap of a lake that refuses to get any shorter, a morning out with my dad, and a heroic amount of breakfast. Even with the football result, that’s a solid day out.
Parkrun #63 — another one ticked off. Not my favourite course ever, and in fact not even my favourite course this year, but solid. And it’s an “H” to contribute to lap 2 of the parkrun alphabet.
