On Saturday the 12th, Hannah and I took a little visit to Nonsuch Park (turns out there is such park) in Cheam. This one was a little more familiar to us as we’d both run 10k races there, albeit not on the bit of the park that the parkrun took place on.
This parkrun was probably the biggest I’d run in (no, I don’t mean we had to run 6km). I believe there were 466 entrants at this one and you could tell. I’d had a little look at some of their past results before we went and seen that they often had 20-30 runners clocking sub-20 so I knew there’d be some fast runners out for this one. For that reason I stood a bit back from the fast folk when we lined up at the start!
It was a nice flat Parkrun this time, largely on paths with a small stretch across the grass which was nice and dry. The guy starting the race announced it was ‘course B’ which presumably is their Winter course as he also stated there’d only be two more before they reverted to ‘course A’ (another one we’ll have to sample, cheeky!). He also proclaimed that this was the one to get a PB on so we were running the easier option. I have to admit, it felt pretty easy too. Although my final time was 20:24 (27 seconds slower than my time at Hove a week before) it was most certainly an easier Parkrun due to the lack of incline and therefore moves into my 1st place in terms of PB potential. I was in my off-road shoes anticipating the ground to be a bit muddier in the grassy portion. It didn’t really slow me down, but in hindsight there was no need to wear them, road would’ve been more suitable. I found that I was running at quite a fast pace for a lot of the route without feeling like I was exerting myself, so a sub-20 time would definitely be achievable on course B.
The scenery was quite nice too. Nonsuch Park is a massive park that could probably accommodate a one lap parkrun, but due to their selection of route, this one was three laps. But, three laps round a nice pretty park quite free of other park users and dog walkers.
The square nature of the laps meant that they didn’t need a huge number of staff around the course, but the large number of entrants meant that they had a lot of scanners and admin people at the finish. The only minor criticism of this one was that when Hannah finished, in quite a large group, she had to queue to cross the finish line which added a few seconds to the time (they didn’t appear to click the watch until she was literally over the line). For a race with so many people they really need a wider finish line which funnels down afterwards if they are concerned about managing the order of finishers.
I can see myself wanting to do this one a couple more times. Once to sample their Summer route and again to have a stab at a sub-20 Winter route.
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