Dartford parkrun 15 - gate scaling, a milestone run, and it's getting slippery on the trail

After a week’s break due to the annual fireworks display, it was great to be back in Dartford’s Central Park in the fairly mild autumnal conditions to start setting up for event 15. A big change since the last Dartford parkrun has been that the refurbishment works on the athletics track have finally started, which is great news, but as the rear part of the Dartford Harriers car park is being used for storage etc, it does mean that there will be reduced car parking capacity for a while.

parkrun [photo: richey estcourt]

The car park gate was locked upon arrival and I had to scale it in order to grab our bits and pieces from the storage container. Myself and Richey got on with the course setup as usual, but by the time we had finished, we were running a little later than usual. Thankfully this wasn’t a problem because when we arrived back at DpHQ most of the other small pre-run jobs had been taken care of.

ivy leaf corner [photo:7t]

For me, today’s run marked a significant numerical point. It was my 100th parkrun outside of my former parkrun home venue, Riddlesdown. So I had a little celebration inside my head at the end of the run for reaching that milestone. The temperature was pretty much spot on for a good running performance, however the stronger winds that had arrived blew away (see what I did there?) any chance of me getting under 19 minutes, but I did manage to stay under 20 minutes, which was nice.

central park athletics track [photo:7t]

The trail section is starting to soften up. There are two particular points where underfoot is getting a little slippery – The bottom corner as you turn to run up the trail incline, and again at the very top of the incline where you turn back onto the grass. The parts in between are covered in leaves and some of the tree roots are quite difficult to see. I didn’t take any photos in that area this week, but I will get over there and get some for a future blog entry (next week, perhaps).

i'm pretty sure i was supposed to be barcode scanning at this point [photo:dani]

Everything post run went really smoothly. Tessa had the results processed by 10.05am, and all the course signage had been collected by marshals and runners, which meant that all I had to do was pop it all into the storage box. Next weekend’s event is going to our first ‘pacer’s day’ – Richey has put a lot of effort into this and I’m looking forward to seeing how close the pacers can get to their chosen times.