With my home parkrun venue, Dartford, cancelled to make way for the Dartford Steam Fair, I arranged to take a few friends over to my former parkrun home, Riddlesdown [full venue description blog]. The slightly embarrassing thing for me was that I hadn't visited in almost two years.
It was a scorcher of a day and we arrived in good time. In total there were ten of us from Dartford parkrun running here and we managed to get a quick snap of us all just before the run started (with the weather being so hot, I thought this would make a better photo than one after the run).
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| dartford ten |
My wife wanted to run, but my daughter didn't, so we took the running buggy with us. This was to be my 72nd run at Riddlesdown and as I had run two races (Dartford Heath 5k and Silverstone 10k) plus a hard Bedgebury Pinetum parkrun in the last week, decided to take it fairly easy.
So I started right at the back and plodded through the first kilometre in 6.16. As the field of runners thinned out I slowly filtered through, increasing the pace for each kilometre until completing the final kilometre in 5.13. Overall a nice easy run, but made a little tougher by having to push the buggy over the rough, bumpy terrain.
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| tokens sorted into lovely little piles of ten [photo:7t] |
The run was secondary to the real reasons for visiting and once it was complete I caught up with a few Riddlesdown regulars that I hadn't seen for ages. We also went to the pub for the post-run social where we did a spot of token sorting volunteering and stayed until 1pm (early by our own standards!).
With parkrun over with for another week, we headed back to Dartford where I headed over to the Dartford Steam Fair with my daughter to check out all the fab steam machines, vintage cars, buses etc etc..
