My local!

A milestone!

31/10/26 : Jersey Farm 

This is my closest event but wasn't the first one I did - for various reasons I went to the main St Albans one first, but couldn't be bothered going quite so far when I went back for my second week. So, on 18th May '24, I took the ten minute walk from my house to the Jersey Farm Country Park - and I remember absolutely nothing about that run except that I hated the hills (and they involved a lot of stopping and walking).

But I've been back a few times since and so, this weekend, I celebrated my 100th event there (out of 119 parkruns in total) - but I also celebrated a second consecutive family-based first. Last week was the first time that our youngest did it and so we had three Reeds doing the same event (Elaine was volunteering for the Poppy Appeal otherwise I'm sure she'd have been there) but this week the eldest was off in Burton doing a spot of parkrun tourism on her own, so it was the first time it was just me and the youngest (yes, Elaine was volunteering again).

Although it's set in a country park, there's quite a few houses about so it has a reasonable catchment area, but there are always many more people there than you might expect - we generally get about 300 and it's definitely not the main event in St Albans (we're lucky enough to have three and this is comfortably the second largest). And anyone who knows parkrun can guess the reason for that - yup, it's the letter J! There are only five such events in the country (three in the South-East and two in the North-East) so we get an awful lot of alphabet-chasing visitors - if you stand too close to the event banner you're going to be asked to take a lot of photos!

So there's always a first-timers briefing (which, as usual, tries to explain the course but basically says "follow the people in front") and then a main pre-race briefing at the start line (complete with a shiny new PA system - "watch out for the cable!"). And then we're off!

We have a summer and winter course because whilst it's lovely to run on the grass in the park, it wouldn't be exactly steady underfoot later in the year and the relatively high number of runners would soon cause a fair bit of damage - the winter course is all on packed earth or stony paths and generally easier to traverse (although it does suffer after heavy rainfall). Given I've been so many times, I obviously quite like the event but I still don't like the hills. The course only has a elevation range of 15 meters but for the summer course you seem to spend a lot of time going up and down over three laps - fortunately, the winter course (which we started this week) just seems less hilly over two and a bit laps. However, I have got better at handling them and don't have to stop now - I even try to attack them if I'm in the mood for it.

And my times have certainly improved - the time at my first event was 28:17 and I've recently got it down to 25:39 (although I was slower this weekend at 28:44 because I had a half the next day, so didn't want to kill myself). My highest position is 77th with a best age-grading of 61.47% - I've no idea whether this takes the hills into account, but it seems decent to me. 

It's nice to have a "home" event (better still that it's close to home) which allows you to see some improvement month-on-month but it's nicer still to see the same people there regularly - Matt and Andy (who I didn't know prior to parkrun) have to get name checks for consistent attendance (although it was nice of Matt to miss quite a few weeks allowing me to get to 100 parkruns before him) and it's always nice to catch up with Paul who is a regular attendee. We also have give Mark a shout-out for his impressively infrequent attendance - last time he managed to get out of bed, the event was cancelled so he turned up to an empty park. It's also impressive how often Pete (my ex next-door neighbour who I haven't seen in years) and I are both present and we've not once managed to see each other (he's much quicker than me, but you think we'd manage to find each other before the race!). 

A few final things to point out - it's easily the best course I've ever run for thanking the marshals. I'd like to claim it's a St Albans thing but it's clearly better here than on either of our other two courses, so well done neighbours (and visitors!). I also have to mention the horses that we "sometimes" see on the course - although there's often plenty of evidence that horses have been present, whenever the pre-race briefing warns about them, the regulars are often heard to mutter "you're more likely to see a unicorn". To be fair, this is absolutely the best thing because it would be a complete nightmare - the one time a horse was spotted, someone was despatched to warn them and the race was delayed for fifteen minutes until they had made themselves scarce.

So it might have hills, but it's my closest event (less than 1km door-to-door) and it's pretty, well organised and friendly (including both people I know and the 99% I don't) - what's not to love? I feel lucky that parkrun exists at all - but I'm very lucky to have Jersey Farm as my local event.