Great marshalling, Angela!

Something new!

03/10/26 : Holywell King George V Playing Fields 

Back in the olden days, I used to get up at 8:30am on a Saturday, pop over to the local park to do parkrun and be back home by 10. But then my eldest got involved and she discovered the joy of the app and the challenges therein - and things got a bit more complicated! In my first 100 parkruns, I attended four different events but in the 15 since, for a variety of reasons, I've attended six further ones. And it's been a whole load of fun and interesting to see how different events are organised - which I'm obviously going to forget unless I take some notes. So here we are!

Today's trip was a 15.7 km journey taking us to the twelfth closest event to us which is the "other Watford" parkrun (the main one is a BIG one, which we'll be covering later) - and, as you might guess, it's in the King George V playing fields in the Holywell area. The reason for this particular trip was to allow Emily to complete the match challenge, whereby the number of your run has to match the number of times this particular event has been arranged - in this particular case, it was both her and their 35th time, which has been planned for quite some time. Due to her recent "incident" (falling off a bike and breaking her collarbone), she's been mostly volunteering in a non-running capacity, but a "run" was required today so she'd arranged to be a tailwalker. So no records would be broken by her, but the app told me it was a flat simple multi-lap course, so I was expecting to get round it relatively speedily.

So, rather than our usual 8:40(ish) departure, we left the house at 7:45 because we didn't know where we going, we had no idea how close the parking was to the course and volunteers have to be there early. Well, Goggle Maps sorted us out without any bother (although it certainly wasn't a straightforward route twisting through the various one way systems of Watford) and took us directly to the free car park which is adjacent to the course (bonus points for that) - so the volunteer was indeed there early. And conspicuously solitary until she read her email which told her that the volunteers meet at the finish line - ah yes, that's where everyone is!

I used the spare time to check out the course and it's fair to say you don't need too many brain cells to work it out - you just run round the outside the playing fields (which are nicely equipped with distance markers and gym equipment). I attended the first timers' briefing anyway (and visitors easily outnumbered regulars in this week) and "run round the field" was the easy bit, but "three and three quarter times - and you have to count it yourself" was the hard bit - apparently they've had people do it anything from two to six times. That was quickly followed by the main briefing - I think the furthest away visitors were from Dublin and we only the one milestone, with the first time briefer running his 200th. I was also disappointed that I'd forgotten to take my tutu with me (it was parkrun's 22 birthday yesterday), but it's fair to say most people hadn't got the memo!

At which point we all wandered the ten metres or so to the somewhat vague start area (there's no danger of a line here) and I assume someone gave us a countdown, but I completely missed it - funnily enough, I was still able to work out the race had started and because the path was reasonable narrow, it was pretty crowded, so there was no danger of any high-speed accidents. The path stayed pretty narrow all the way round, but the grass edge was in good condition so overtaking wasn't an issue and the field spread out pretty quickly - I found my place in the field within the first half lap and think I was only overtaken once in the whole of the rest of it (with the woman in front of me for most of it slowly increasing her lead on me as the event progressed). 

And basically that was it! I didn't have any difficulty with footing and it is indeed pretty flat - there are a couple of slight inclines but nothing to frighten the horses, with Strava telling me that elevation varied by a whole five metres around the lap. There aren't many marshals around the course, but they're really not required from the point of view of providing directions and I certainly didn't feel there were any safety issues in case of injury because the course is so compact and accessible. I also didn't have any issues counting my laps, but I can imagine I could mess it up if I didn't have my watch or phone with me (but this is true on many occasions in my life). 

And with the field being spread out and the course being flat and in good condition (it's possible to avoid grass and mud completely except for the finish), I was able to maintain a steady and (for me) speedy pace - there was some slowdown towards the end but I'm unable to blame that on anyone except myself. The finish funnel was well organised but it's fair to say with the field so spread out, my section didn't overly trouble anyone because I was approx 20s behind the person in front of me and 20s ahead of the person behind me. And there's also a cafe at the end which is always nice to see - I heard several people comment on how reasonable the prices were and they also had a gluten-free brown option which Emily appreciated. If I had to quibble (and I realise there's absolutely nothing they can do about this) I didn't like the number of right angle bends on the course, each of which requires a noticeable slowdown (by me, at least) - if they could just buy some of the neighbouring houses and knock them down to increase the size of the park, I'd appreciate it. 

However, I can't really complain too much because I got an official PB - 25:27, taking three seconds off my previous best (I was only lapped once despite expecting a stream of overtakers). Because it was a new event to me, I made progress on several challenges (including the all important alphabeteer) and I also made progress on the position bingo challenge - I was 30th (out of 98), the 25th male, 4th in my age category (this might be my highest) with an age graded score of 61.95% (also my highest).  It wasn't my fastest 5k because Strava told me the course was only 4.95km long, so I had to add a quick fifty metres after the finish funnel, but it still gave me a 5k time of 26:00, which is very decent for me. 

So all was good from a running point of view - what did the volunteer think? Once she'd found everyone, they were all very friendly and helpful and it was nice of the race briefing to call out the fact that she was doing the match challenge (we'll gloss over the fact that he amusingly called her Angela). And she had a great time with her fellow tailwalkers hearing tales about the event - they had a slight issue at the beginning where they slowed down to accommodate some people who turned out not to be doing the event, but that worked out well for me because it meant I got to lap them twice (and I obviously called her Angela whilst doing so). 

Some final trivia for you - as we rocked up to the event, one of our fellow runners remarked that this was the longest named parkrun. This obviously resulted in an internet challenge to find out whether he was making that up - and, as is often the way, things turned out to be not that simple, because parkruns have a short and a long name. Considering the long name, the longest is "Millennium Country parkrun, Forest of Marston Vale" (in Bedfordshire, so we'll have to make the trip some time) with this event only coming fifth, but considering the short name "Frankston Nature Conservation Reserve" (in Australia, so less likely to happen) takes the crown, with this event coming fourth, but first in the UK. So in terms of what you see written on the parkrun sign, he was close enough to telling the truth!

All in all, this was a well organised and friendly event on a flat course in a nice park so I enjoyed it - even before I got my official time through with the email arriving at 10:08, which is absolutely the fastest I've ever got my results. I won't be rushing back to it often, but that's only because it's not exactly the most convenient for me - but if I get perilously close to sub-25 minutes on other courses without managing to crack it, I may well head back here because it's definitely one of the fastest courses I've run. Thank you to all the volunteers (including Angela) for making it a lovely start to the weekend.

I will continue this chain both backwards and forwards in time - events I've been to but will never revisit (and there's certainly a couple) will be written about retrospectively but ones I'll be back to will be dealt with on special occasions in the future - and we've got one coming up next week!