I had the honour of running Bushy Park parkrun on 1st January 2014 all down to the fact that I have a wonderful partner who organised our New Year’s Eve celebrations that were only 40 minutes away from Bushy.
Ok it might not be everyone’s cup of tea to get up at 6:30am in New Year’s Day and pull on Lycra running capris and a head off in the dark, dank and drizzly morning at 7:30am! I
suspect that a large majority were nursing hangovers and wondering /marvelling exactly how they ended up in bed not only underdressed but in their JP’s as the last thing they remember was singing along to meatloaf on the karaoke.
Now don't get me wrong I am not knocking it, if you can do it GREAT. However, long gone have the days where I could drink most of the night and still function the next day; feeling sick to my stomach is not something that I relish and the next day is always a write off for me and I always feel incredibly guilty about.
Back to Bushy, if you don't know it already Bushy Park is a mecca for all parkrunners, it was where it all began back in 2004 with just 13 runners in Bushy Park, Teddington. Bushy regularly gets well over 500 runners each week, it really a sight to behold, they have great signs like when you are in the audience of a TV show “Quite please during the run briefing” which made me giggle, and “caution hazard” signs which made me wonder was the marshal the hazard or something else!
I really enjoyed the run and you would think that being one of 571 finishers on the day and being over 100 miles away from home that I wouldn't know anyone. Well you would be wrong I met and chatted Joanne Sinton-Hewitt the wife of the brains behind the concept of parkrun. Only the week previous we had met the week before at my local parkrun where both her and Paul enjoyed the hills of Hanley parkrun before joining up for coffee at the church café afterwards.
My second encounter was Neil Hankey, who noticed my Trentham top, we got talking about how he was a native of Stoke on Trent and had run Hanley parkrun on a number of occasions when he visited home, which was all very nice but it was close to the finish and I really wanted to go sub 25 minutes for my 1st parkrun of 2014.
Aalst it was not to be (25:12 and finished 240th), but I can't really blame Neil it was a very wet and muddy finis. I think that if I had pushed on hard I may very well have performed a spectacular faceplant in the finish funnel, not something I would have wanted to be remembered for!
I'm very close to celebrating my 50th parkrun and I'm hoping that on my 2nd day of being 40 I can also celebrate being 50!
To find out more about parkrun check out these links:
