I’m behind on my blog posts. Way behind on my blog posts. Fifty-four draft posts taunting me every time I venture into the posts section of my blog. I’m now so far behind that I cannot even remember running events or what happened there to make it an interesting blog post.
Take our visit to Bedford parkrun for example. It was back in September and part of my continued parkrun tourism but I can’t remember running there. If you’d asked me yesterday “fancy running Bedford this weekend?” then I’d check my diary and say “yeah, sounds like a nice place to visit”. Except I’ve been there already. I now check my parkrun history and blog posts before committing to my weekly Saturday morning parkrun fix.
I did a Google image search for Bedford parkrun in a bid to jog my memory. Looks like a park. Any park. Bandstand looks a bit familiar. That building in the middle of the park rings a bell. Garmin shows my run started at 9:18am. That’s the one! The parkrun that started really, really late.
I joined Other Dan at Hanger Lane to meet Alfie and Simon for a joint visit to Bedford. Simon was kind enough to drive and we got our first peek at the fabled Simon parkrun spreadsheet. It started out as a list of 100 parkruns to visit but was now down to a handful. He spelt parkrun with a capital P though. Minus 20 points from Gryffindor.
We parked in one of the nearby streets then joined everyone in the park. Alfie went for a warm-up. The rest of us went hunting for the toilets. We then waited for the run briefing. Waited a bit more. Checked our watches were working. Waited some more. Scratched our heads. Waited. Finally listened through the briefing and clapped our thanks for the volunteers. Now time to start! No! Now time to walk through the park to the start line!
Eventually we were off running for our two and a half laps of the park. Alfie and Simon went off in the distance together, trying out a pace for the Ealing Half where they’d be running as pacers. Other Dan stayed with me as I huffed and puffed round. A couple of young kids were ahead. Then we overtook them. Then they sprinted past. This repeated for a while before they ran out of running and we left them behind.
It was a lovely day for a run in a beautiful park. The volunteers were wonderful and I make my comments about the lateness with a cheerful smile on my face. It really was that late but we got an awesome free 5k run cheered on by fantastic volunteers.