Running On Empty

As the summer heat continues (albeit only 18C today), my running buddy and I headed back to Seaton Sluice to have another go at the 7.5K loop taking in the clifftops to St Mary's island as well as some waggonways and part of Holywell Dene. All of my photos were of the wildlife on this run, it seems 🤷‍♂️ Aaaaand... given this was weeks ago now (ignore the publish date), I've forgotten pretty much everything about the run except that we ended early as my running buddy was just shattered. Fair play. It was still a lovely morning.

Three full weeks since my last run and I only go and try a parkrun at a course with a killer of a hill in it. And, ultimately, this became only the second ever parkrun that I've had to walk part of. Disappointing, but this time it was down to a persistent injury rather than a dodgy gut. Things were going ok for most of the run — I'd at least made it up the hill without needing to walk, even if I was taking very short strides — but at about 4km, I started to feel the knee. I had maybe another half kilometre to go before the steep downhill to return to the start/finish area, but even over the course of that, I could tell it was going to be problematic. The 5 or so metres of downhill as I made the final turn by the duckpond just confirmed it. And as soon as I rounded the corner to descend properly, it took only a few yards to concede that finishing after a bit of walking was better than not finishing at all. Not me, for the record. I just 'borrowed' the image from the Park...

I'm writing up this run pretty late. Like, 4 weeks late. (Even if the publish date is the day of the run.) So yeah, for some mad reason, I decided to go for a run at 10pm about a month ago. I must've been feeling pretty good to have been up for a run at that time and the weather was decent enough that it wasn't freezing. I even aimed to do 7.5K instead of the usual 5K, heading up to and around Burradon pond, in the hopes of working up to a 10K event later in the summer. Unfortunately, I messed it up on two counts. First, I got my bearings completely wrong on the tracks skirting the housing estates by the pond. This is a perennial problem with me and this area. I simply can't get it in my head to map the trails on a map (before the run) to the real-life tracks that I run. Anyway, it meant I was accidentally cutting the run short and I had to improvise a bit to get back on track. Even the swans at Killingworth Lake had called it a night Secondly though, my left knee start...

No, not that Colton Herta , but yes, he is the reason I named the run that. Herta in his IndyCar days. Photo blatantly pilfered from the BBC Sport pages. So, last weekend saw the family visiting my father-in-law in Leeds and we ended up staying overnight in Colton, on the eastern side of the city. The weather was glorious — maybe a little too glorious — and I knew that Temple Newsam was within reach of our hotel, so a route was planned for the Sunday morning: The route, as planned on onthegomap.com, which is still my favourite route mapping tool. As it turned out, while it was only 16C at the time I ran, when the sun was on you, it was sweltering. In the end, I only just managed the 5K before the heat and the jarring nature of the run, with hard, rutted paths, took its toll on my left knee. While I did hit 5K, I cut the run short by about 250m to give my knee a break and to cool down a bit by walking the last bit back to the hotel. The Avenue at Temple Newsam, heading downhi...

It's only just struck me that I never posted about any of the other fantasy parkrun courses I'd tried designing. Let's make amends for that. By now, I've actually run and posted about two such courses: Weetslade Country Park near Gosforth Park Watergate Forest Park near Team Valley ...but where else did I have in mind? Plessey Woods Country Park near Bedlington offers more woodland, pasture and riverside running opportunities: Plessey Woods fantasy parkrun route; 3 laps of the main loop Starting near the visitor centre, it heads downhill through the open grassy area towards the footbridge over Pegwhistle Burn before doing three undulating laps up to and through the meadow, down to the River Blyth and back alongside Pegwhistle Burn to the start of the loop. After the 3rd tour, it's back up the hill to where you started. To be honest, this would probably be a fairly brutal parkrun, with lots of up and down, some of it even up steps, if I remember rightly. But the s...

Yonks back, when I was still all keen, I started making up 'fantasy' parkrun courses based on places I'd seen on Google Maps or onthegomap.com that looked suitable for a 5K run. This weekend, I finally made it to one of the green bits I'd spotted on the map: Watergate Forest Park. The lake at Watergate Forest Park is probably its main feature but I barely saw it While I'd already mapped out a 5K-ish route a while back, there was also a 5K mapped out on AllTrails too and it turns out that even on the free tier, you get to see your location on the route as you run. Bonus! Turns out it was only about 2 minutes' drive from home too. Anyway, how was the course? Pretty good, actually. The paths are mostly fine-to-medium grade gravel and fairly wide, with a little bit of regular forest floor type of trail too. On the route I took (I veered from the AllTrails route a little), the gradients were also pretty good: a few hundred metres of gentle undulation followed by abo...