Parkrun Week 37

“Nobody sighs louder than an unemployed, debt free, well fed dog who sleeps 16 hours a day ” – Anon

Good morning lovely Dashers. How are y’all? My sincere apologies for the lateness of this weeks report. I’m all back from my little jaunt over to Boston, the jet-lag is dissipating and I’ve had time to review another weekend of Dashers excellence at parkruns by you all. Sadly Boston has yet to embrace the parkrun culture in full so I wasn’t able to participate myself this week. However, what a fantastic city it is to run; there are great routes around the harbour and the Boston Common (America’s oldest public park) I ran each morning and it was wonderful – and certainly helped justify the clam chowder, lobster rolls and Boston cream pies! I can’t recommend the city highly enough if you ever get chance.

Oh, and I visited the finish line of the Boston Marathon and risked jumping into traffic to jog across the line – so I’m technically a Boston Marathon finisher, right? That’s certainly the closest I will ever get!

Anyway, enough of my ‘tour guide barbie’ ramblings. Many congratulations to all of you wonderful Dashers who did grace a parkrun this weekend and, once again, you smashed it. We had 22 of you lovely people visiting 11 different venues again this week with a huge 9 doing so at parkruns for the first time. I do think it’s always refreshing to visit different locations and you seem to really embrace this. We had excellent Top-10 finishes from Brian Shaw (3rd at Burnley), Joe Cotton (2nd at Witton and which was also a PB!) and Diane Dudgeon (2nd at Centre Vale) Super stuff! There was also a sparkly new PB this week for Helen Woodcock who flew round Fletcher Moss and we must also say a huge congratulations to Niall Bancroft who completed his 50th parkrun. An excellent milestone.

Niall also recorded his best performance score of the season in the Men’s Championship, which saw him leap 4 places in the table from 26th to 22nd position. Jez Turner also recorded his highest percentage which is excellent running from an already high base and is consolidated his third place behind long-time leader Brian Shaw and Simon Smith. In fact, 4 of the top 5 in the Championship improved their overall averages which shows the high quality competition that we have.

In the Ladies Championship, it is no less high-calibre. Our leader, Linda Coffey, had a week off but retained her advantage over Jacqueline Shaw with Diane Dudgeon closing up in third place. Andrea Hopwood was the highest climber this week with a 2-position improvement from 19th to 17th and Rebecca Simms moving up from 10th into 9th after a strong run at lovely Newborough Forest.

And so, while I stare at the ridiculously mountainous pile of washing that seems disproportionate to the number of days I’ve been away (how does that always seem to happen?) we can look forward to this weeks parkrun fun and games. Sadly, there will be no such frivolities at Ormskirk or Northwich as they are cancelled this week so hopefully that saves you a wasted trip. A big shout out to our beginners group graduates who will no doubt be smashing it at Burnley this weekend as they receive their (metaphorical caps and gowns) – if you can make it to Towneley Park I’m sure they would appreciate it.

And, of course, wherever you do manage to find yourself at 9:00 am on Saturday, happy parkrunning!