Park Run

Today I undertook my first bit of park run tourism and ran the St Peters Parkrun in Sydney. Parkrun is weekly free 5 kilometres run on a Saturday morning, most of the runs are in the UK there are runs all over the world. When you register for Parkrun you get a bar code that works everywhere and they e-mail you the times you get. The event is put on by volunteers many of whom run as well as volunteering each week. I have been working hard on my weight this year and that has brought my times down from 29 and a bit to 25 and a bit with a new PB of 24:50 last week.

This was going to be my 125^th Parkrun. And from my hotel I took the train into Sydney and then back out to St Peters where the parkrun was due to start at 9AM.  At the interchange station I met a woman who was down from Brisbane and had chosen to run the event as well. On arrival at the park we were told it was a smaller group as there was a running festival at Bondi beach the next day…. Not that small I guess it was about 200 people. The run was a two-lap course on pathways in a park on the site of a former brickworks and was the original Sydney Parkrun, the weather was wall to wall sunshine and the temperature 16 Celsius…. Perfect conditions.  The event was well marshalled and they had even gone to the trouble of writing messages on the path in chalk, the messages were a mixture of useful information like Keep left and route markers and then after about 2.5KM we reached a hill, the message in chalk said “welcome to our hill” it was as the hill got steeper the next message said “Keep going you are doing really well” a little further of “as Bon Jovi said “your half way there”  and then “enjoy your parkrun” “you’re at the top it’s downhill now.” Incidentally the view from the top was spectacular with the Sydney skyline in front of us, at the bottom of the hill the run went through a wooded area and the bird song was totally different that that heard in the UK. Finally, after the second lap It was a right turn to the finish funnel where I was 109^th in a time of 26:50. As a running experience it was right up there as one of the best, if not the best, I have ever had. I had a huge buzz that I still have now twelve hours later a flight to Singapore.