Tag Archives: running

parkrun tourism: Penrose

by Ben

For a while I’d been reading rumours about a parkrun starting up near where my parent live in Cornwall. The nearest parkrun for a long time was Lanhydrock, and that was realistically too far, at just over an hour’s drive. So I was overjoyed when I was pottering about online and came across a reference to Penrose parkrun: within hours I’d arranged a trip down to visit my family! (I do love them really…)

As seems to be a trend in my reports, my preparation was not ideal. It was my birthday on Thursday, so we had massive takeaway pizza, and red wine. On Friday, at my parents, I had two takeaway meals from the Chinese, and a huge slice of triple-layer chocolate birthday cake, and red wine. On Saturday morning, the last thing my body was up for was running.

The views were stunning (credit: Graham Horn)

Penrose is a lovely area between Helston and Porthleven on the south coast of Cornwall. People might suggest I’m biased, coming from there, but it is actually a fact that nowhere else in the world is as nice. Seriously, ask those people on QI or something! The Penrose estate is managed by the National Trust, and is mostly woodland around a lake, Loe Pool, and along the coast. So it isn’t really a surprise that the scenery on this run was pretty stunning. Even being familiar with the area, my breath was somewhat taken away when we turned the corner to run on the clifftop above the sea for a short stretch. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Although the course info advised parking in a big car park at the bottom of Helston and running a couple of kilometres to the start, we opted to take the other option, and squeeze our car into the much smaller car park only a few hundred metres from the start. I do feel sorry for any holiday makers who had decided to pop out for an early morning walk and found the car park overflowing, but never mind! Next time, now that I know where everything is and what’s going on, we’ll probably run there, but I preferred being nice and close first time around.

The start was reasonably well organised, the estates old stables provided the meeting point, and after a typically friendly welcome and briefing, we were shepherded to the start line, and after a 3-2-1-GO, we were off!

Knowing that there were a few hills, and that my body probably wasn’t in peak condition, I had decided to take it easy for the first mile, and then see what I had. Or, as actually happened, sprint off like a gazelle, and hope that the cheetah tired before I did. Yeah – my pacing is AWFUL. If you ever want to run consistent splits, and you’re near me… just do whatever I’m not!! The first mile ran mostly alongside Loe Pool, but in all honesty, I don’t recall seeing the lake much. It might well have been visible and pretty, but I was mostly watching the feet of the two runners just ahead of me, and not really concentrating on the gorgeous scenery I was raving about earlier. At least, not until I rounded that corner and joined the south west coast path.

Spectating cows! (credit: Penrose parkrun)

The views around Mount’s Bay were simply stunning. Unfortunately, while parkrun is a run, not a race, I wasn’t about to hang around lollygagging. After a reasonable stretch running along the coast above Porthleven Sands, we turned away from the sea, and up hill. This is more or less where my lack of preparation kicked in – the climb isn’t that severe, about 150 ft, but in trying to stay with the people around me, I pretty much destroyed my legs, so when the course flattened off at the top, I had nothing left for the final three-quarters of a mile. This second half of the course is predominantly on smaller tracks around fields, and the footing is a little bit trickier than the paths at the start, but still nothing too serious. A final dash around a field of spectating cows led to the finish line.

For a relatively new parkrun, it was very well organised, particularly given the distance between the start and finish lines. There was even one of the core team offering to laminate barcodes for the runners to make it easier on the scanners – if that isn’t service, I don’t know what is! All in all, a brilliant parkrun, and I would highly recommend it to anyone in west Cornwall on a Saturday.

parkrun tourism: Burnham and Highbridge

by Lolly

Just over 6 months after our visit to Pomphrey Hill we hit the road again, this time to try something new. Brand new. Our first spot of inaugural parkrun tourism, and a mere 15 miles away from our home event.

Burnham and Highbridge parkrun is, as the name suggests, in Burnham-on-Sea & Highbridge. It was pretty straight forward to locate, albeit having the use of a satnav, and there is a free car park right near the start/finish. As this was the first event we had no idea how many people to expect, but the car park filled up nicely, and we even found a few more friends from ‘home’.

The water did look blue, promise!

After speeches from various officials, and the standard pre-race briefings, the group of runners all set off, seeming very chirpy for a Saturday morning. The course starts in a park (how novel!), winding its way round a lake and other pretty scenery. And a playpark, which is useful to note for future reference. The route then heads out onto the river path (more running near water) – which eventually becomes the esplanade (yet more running near water).

Partway along the walkway, lovely marshals directed us round a building and back the way we came. The turnaround point is at roughly the 2 mile mark, and so on return the course leaves the river path a little earlier to cut back into the park. The finish sneaks up on you somewhat, due to its position near a corner, but I was lucky enough to have friends warning me of this. (Ben: This was me and Iain, screaming madly “the finish is just around the corner, you can sprint from here!”) And a Garmin beeping for 3 miles always helps as well.

Credit: Mark Benton

We’d been a little nervous beforehand about the out-and-back nature of the course, but I found it worked really well. Being near the middle of the pack I had the benefit of seeing runners going the opposite way both out and back, and it really added to the community feel of the event. Turning around a building also helped to ease the jerking feeling of doubling back. Another factor with the paths used is that the surface is excellent quality throughout. Not one to try if you love fields and tracks, but definitely one to chase PBs on.

It’s definitely a parkrun we’d like to head back to, and its proximity means it stands a good chance. There were 144 finishers on Saturday, and while we were by no means the only visitors the results show 58 people completed their first ever parkrun. And given their location I imagine that summer tourism will see many paying them a visit.

parkrun tourism: Pomphrey Hill

by Ben

This post originally appeared on Ben’s old blog, Running From the Physio.

At the weekend, my wife and I headed off again to try out another parkrun. This time, a Christmas party in Bristol with my wife’s family was the excuse. There are four parkruns in and around Bristol: Ashton Court, Little Stoke, Pomphrey Hill and Chipping Sodbury. There is also one in Bath. As we were staying in Keynsham the two most logical options were Pomphrey Hill and Bath, and despite the worrying aspect of the name, we went for Pomphrey Hill.

As luck(?) would have it, Ira Rainey (one of them there Twitter folk: @IraRainey) was run director for the day, so I had a ready source of information for the event, and it would be a good excuse to meet him face to face. (In a public environment, in case he turned out to be a mad axe-murderer.) He proved to both supply good information, recommending trail shoes rather than road shoes, and not be a mad axe-murderer (at least, not on a Saturday morning…)

A cold and frosty morning for a run. (Credit: Ira Rainey)

I wasn’t too keen on the idea of three laps, but on the other hand, I’d raced in the Street 5k series early in the week, and that consisted of five laps, so three didn’t seem quite so bad. The run briefing was fun and interactive, and definitely one that other parkruns could learn from. For example, asking if any runners have hit an “anniversary run” helps to avoid cliquishness that might otherwise set in. With all that done, we were asked to step back behind the line, which ruined my cunning plan to shave half a second off my finishing time!

Pomphrey Hill is quite a small parkrun, typically attracting less than 100 runners: with this in mind, and a look at previous results, I knew that I should be running in and around the top 10, an unusually lofty position, and one that normally means I’ve set off far too fast!

So, the course:
In many ways, of the local parkruns I’ve done in the past couple of months, this one was most similar to our own at Longrun Meadow. It was run entirely on paths around a playing field, though they varied between light gravel, tarmac and bark. The major difference was the hill. Longrun Meadow is pretty pancake like. Pomphrey Hill, as the name might suggest, is not. The cry of “Up Pomphrey!” during the run briefing gave me the idea that this possibly was not “just” a hill. Actually, as Ira pointed out at the end, it’s only actually just under 40 ft of climb. However, the steepness, combined with the fact that this was the spongy bark-covered part of the course made it more sapping than perhaps it should have been. Of course, what goes up must come down, and in its own way, the descent was as difficult as the ascent: the frosty morning meant that despite the salt that had been put down, footing was a little hairy on the tarmac path back down the hill.

The great advantage of multiple laps is the obvious fact that after the first time around, you know what’s coming and can adjust your pace in anticipation: be that slowing for a hill, or accelerating because there isn’t far left. The disadvantage is that when you have just got to the top of a hill, you are aware that you still have to run up it another twice!! Still, on balance I think I actually quite enjoyed the shorter laps, as it helped me to maintain a more consistent pace than I typically manage at Longrun Meadow.

Back to my run:
I spent much of the race in tenth place, and pushed up to eighth on the climb Up Pomphrey on the final lap. Despite actually being slower up and down the hill on my third lap, I held on to eighth place, and even put in a trademark sprint finish to cement it. Once I’d finished I looped back on the course a little bit to cheer on my wife, who was coming around to start her final lap, and had a chat to a couple of the other runners. Unsurprisingly for a parkrun, particularly a small one, everyone was very friendly and chatty: it’s great to be part of such a nice community, even when miles from home!

Final analysis: I finished in 21:05, my second fastest parkrun anywhere, which was something of a surprise given how much harder the course felt (and the fact that my watch said 21:22, but no more about that!) My wife completed her first parkrun since July, since when she has been beset with chest problems. All in all, a good fun morning, and a course we both want to go back to.

parkrun tourism: Yeovil Montacute

by Ben

This post originally appeared on Ben’s old blog, Running From the Physio.

We returned to visit Yeovil Montacute again in 2018 during the winter, when they were using their “B” course at Ham Hill, read about that here.

A couple of weeks ago, I headed out for a little more parkrun tourism. It came hot on the heels of a visit to Killerton, and was the last week in a five-week absence from my home parkrun (rest, illness, Killerton, rest, Yeovil). I was quite tempted to just head to my home run after so long away, but this bit of tourism had been planned for a while, so I stuck with the plan.

Location:
This is technically the next closest parkrun to me after Longrun Meadow, although the differing quality of the roads means that it takes more or less the same time to do the 22 mile drive to Yeovil Montacute as it does to drive 28 miles to Killerton. Like Killerton, the Yeovil Montacute run is located in the grounds of a National Trust property. Unlike Killerton, the route goes right past the house, with the east façade (pictured) providing a gorgeous backdrop to the run. Admittedly, despite the size and glamour of the building, my attention was elsewhere while running!

The stunning Montacute House (credit: Mike Searle, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Terrain:

Again, this varied completely from either of Longrun Meadow or Killerton. The route was entirely run on grass, and undulated throughout. The course was reasonably dry when I ran it, but I suspect that some of the ditches that I dropped down into would get quite tasty in the winter months. In fact, the ditch jumps, which Sarah (@mia79gbr) raved about so much in her blog post back in April, were the main reason I wanted to do this course so much. What I did forget reading in her post was that there was a “massive hill in the last kilometre”. This did catch me a little by surprise. It shouldn’t have done, but it did. Underfoot, the course is most similar to a cross-country course: my trail shoes performed admirably, but a set of XC spikes would probably be the most effective. Once it gets a bit wetter, this isn’t a course I’d recommend attempting in normal road shoes, I suspect you’d slip all over the place!

Course:

The route takes in one “little lap” and one “big lap”. At the end of the first lap, the little one, you are running directly towards the house, the finish and all the cheering supporters. This provides a similar boost to the traditional lap set-up at Longrun Meadow, although I didn’t see a similar boost in pace! The big lap then completes an entire circuit of the grounds.

Summarising, I really enjoyed the run. I ran a slower time than I’ve achieved at either Killerton or Longrun, although my pacing was pretty awful, so that will have played a part. It is less well-attended than either of those as well, which did make the latter part of the race a little uncompetitive: it was pretty clear that I would finish 17th, no higher and no lower, for the last mile of the run. That said, as with every parkrun I’ve attended, the support was great from all the volunteers and spectators, and I would love to go back when it’s a little bit wetter! Additionally, I’m really glad to have three such completely different courses as my three nearest parkrun events.