parkrun
Everyone who’s anyone (!) knows that Saturday morning is is dedicated to parkruns. 9am sharp, get to your nearest local venue and give it a go.
If you’ve never done one before, it’s a series of weekly timed runs of 5km. They are organised by local volunteers, and they are free to enter. A range of people go, but the idea is that they are ideal for everyone from club runners to absolute beginners. No judgement, no time pressure, nothing like that. Just turn up, have a plod round, and feel proud and happy. And then wash your kit and go again next week.
You can find out everything you need to know at parkrun.org.uk, including rules for registering, and where all the venues are.
Why put it on a geocaching page?
In case you hand’t noticed, I’m a bit of an itinerant soul. parkrun, like geocaching, is non-competitive, free, and offers the chance to go to lots of new places. And as with geocaching, if you go somewhere you don’t like, you don’t have to go back. So it’s ideal for someone who likes to explore a bit. For me, I can get into a nice rhythm. Some weeks I’m happy to stay home and do my nearest one. Other weeks I like to explore other venues (parkrun tourism) with a view to completing various silly challenges based on the names of the venue. More of that below.
Challenges
Unofficial statistics sites track your progress through your own running performance, but also through the geographical spread of venues that you’ve visited. So one challenge, for instance, is “finish position bingo”, where you track whether you’ve finished in each of 100 different finishing positions (so, 1st, 101st, 201st, etc, and 2nd, 102nd, 202nd, all the way up to 100th, 200th, 300th. That can be done without travelling at all, assuming your favoured parkrun usually has more than 100 runners.
Others are various games based on the number of venues, or wordplays based on the name of the venue. For instance, the “Cowell Club” is for people who’ve run 100 different venues and the “Freyne Club” is for people who’ve run 250 venues. Both of those are named after the first person to achieve it.
My current target is to complete a lap around the alphabet. The parkrun alphabet doesn’t (yet) contain the letter “X” as there aren’t any parkruns that begin with that letter. So “Alphabeteer” requires you to run a minimum of 25 different venues, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet. At the time of the first writing of this post, I am two shy of my first lap – I need an E and a J. The alphabet challenge is made more difficult for British runners because there aren’t any Z’s here. For a Z you need to go to The Netherlands, Poland or South Africa, where there are plenty. The UK is also not exactly littered with Q’s or J’s, which explains why they are two of my later finds.
My parkrun Journey
Below is a list of where I’ve run (and when). You’ll notice I rarely make reference to how quickly I run. I’m not a great runner and my times vary significantly depending on the course, and on whether I had a beer the night before. Anyway, it’s not competitive. But for the record, my best ever was under 23 minutes, run in Milton Keynes in 2014. I had a lot less years and kilograms when I did that. My current pace is just straining the 30 minute mark. So no times. I don’t run them for times, and anyway, all my actual times are on Strava (when I remembered to take my running watch with me).
So I’m close to the end of my first alphabet as I write this, but for certain letters of the alphabet I’m already well past the second and third cycles. For “B”, I’ve done seven already. I believe “B” has the highest total number of venues for the UK. “J” only has 3 UK locations on the mainland and one on Jersey. “Q” only has 4 UK venues, and they are spread far and wide.
Individual Posts
Below are all the posts I wrote about parkrunning. Some of them are just about parkruns. Others are about geocaching days where I did a parkrun in the morning. Or something like that.
