Running On Empty

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...

Finally made it back to Weetslade Country Park for another fantasy parkrun, a full 7 months after my first visit . So much for my excitement at making up parkrun courses; this place is only just round the corner from me too! 🙄 This time, I ran the route in reverse to see what it was like. Given this would mean tackling the steepest hill on the course going uphill rather than downhill, I wasn't expecting it to be faster — especially given I'm still feeling a bit off my best pace. In the end, however, I managed to do a Google Fit-measured 5km in a time just one second slower than my time from last June. I'm calling that a victory. (Yes, I did say "slower" but come on... this was the harder way. 👀) Note how the Pace trace doesn't match the per-kilometre pace table below it. Google Fit, innit! 🙄 Anyway, yeah, doing it in reverse this time did at least avoid the knee-jarring descent that was an issue last time. But it replaced it with an absolute crawl up to th...

Indulge me for a moment. There was a time, back in my early-to-mid 20s, that I spent a very large chunk of my spare time on the computer, playing and making mods (and modding tools) for the Geoff Crammond Grand Prix games. While I had practically  zero social life (at least, in meatspace), I still look back on that time fondly as the most intensely creative period of my life. Turns out I even made car livery textures. Pleased with the rear wing of the Viz car! 😂 The thing I most enjoyed doing was imagining and creating 'fantasy' tracks. That is, purely imaginary circuits that you could then race. Which brings me onto this post and run. In recent weeks, I've been playing around with the idea of "If I could create my own parkrun course, where would I do it?" . Firing up onthegomap.com , finding local parks, and mapping out a 5K course has given me a feeling a bit like making F1 tracks back in the day. And tonight was my first run on one of the courses I've pu...