Midweek: Elswick Park 5K

The gaps between my runs are getting longer. This is not good. I'm reverting to one-run-per-week territory. 😞

With this in mind, I chose to have a lunchtime run today plus a parkrun on the weekend rather than just repeating last Friday's run-to-work tomorrow.


So, despite the fact it had just been snowing, I headed out of the office knowing I had mercifully few meetings to trouble my lunchtime. I'd planned the route on onthegomap.com before heading out too, so knew I'd be doing just under 5km, which was fine. I also knew I'd have a bit of a hill in the first half, as I was heading up Westgate Road past all the motorbike shops.

As it turned out, I did just over 5km. At the turning point by Elswick Park, I was checking street names to spot the "Gloucester Road" that I'd seen on the website. When I thought I was passing it, all I saw was a very faded sign for a road that appeared to be named Milligan something-or-other. Comparing to Google Maps now, I can see that onthegomap.com simply has the street name wrong. It was in fact Mill Lane. So, I overshot while looking for the non-existent Gloucester Road before doubling back when I figured I'd just misread the map.

I'd kinda been hoping that Elswick Park, through which I then ran, would be a pleasant little park. I'd not heard of it before and I've stumbled on plenty of other nice spots like this, but alas, it was a bit basic and grim. Just patches of grass with tarmac paths around them.

From there, the only things of note were Cruddas Park shopping centre, which has to be the grimmest looking shopping centre I've ever seen, and the fact that I passed a neighbour of mine as I approached St James' Boulevard for the second time. Knowing that I'd not set the world alight with my pace in the first half of the run, I tried to kick it up a notch on the return. I might've even ventured into sub-5-minute per km pace had it not been for waiting for traffic at pedestrian crossings.


Oh, and don't believe the slow pace of the final quarter km in the above; GPS must've been doing weird things, as I was definitely doing a decent pace at that point.

So, overall, it was a good run to get in the bag. I still love that I can just do a 5km run pretty much any time I like and not worry about whether I'll manage it. That gives me no end of joy. Let's just hope I can translate this kind of thing into better parkrun times at some point.


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