24 January 2015 – Wythenshawe Parkrun Number 171

Sue and I turned out for today’s Parkrun in fairly benign conditions, though in order to avoid further destruction of the northern touchlines, Andy and Co had devised a route to the south of the football pitches. I hope we didn’t do too much damage.

We started in a different place to usual, resulting in a little congestion in ‘Holloway’s Bog’, but nobody got too badly trampled.

As Sue had pulled a muscle in between getting out of bed and being handed her early morning cuppa, she helped to marshall at a distant part of the course, and took the opportunity to snap a few of us – 18 pictures that can be viewed here.

There were just two of us in my age group. I passed Michael on the first lap, accusing him of being an old timer (he’s a couple of weeks older than me), which he told me afterwards had given him the impetus to make an adrenaline fuelled spurt on the second lap which left me for dead. Well done, Michael.

The route, which is probably about 5.1 km (Parkrun ‘wet weather’ routes are always a little longer than the normal routes) was two laps of the course shown below. Everyone seemed quite happy with it, so well done ‘management’ on coming up with this after having to cancel the run last week for fear of damaging the pitches.

Today’s 183 ‘runners’ included 77 females, a good proportion, and everyone finished within an hour, in some cases only just within an hour, which makes me think that they either had a major incident, or did they perhaps walk? “Parkwalk?”

Anyway that made for a very sociable interlude in the cafe whilst the marshalls swept up the last of the runners and collected all the signage. In fact we’ve come to spend more time in the cafe than we do on the run – that’s to some extent the nature of Parkrun.

The results are here.

PS Sunday morning had me puzzling over a photo published on Wythenshawe Parkrun’s Facebook page, taken by volunteer Bea Holloway, one of the younger members of the Holloway dynasty. I couldn’t resist including it below – Wythenshawe Park at its best on a Saturday morning. Well done Bea, I hope you don’t mind me using your little piece of magic.