Durham parkrun: 1st Trial Run

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Alister Robson

On a bright if slightly chilly morning, volunteers, spectators, 27 adult runners, 1 junior and 1 greyhound gathered at Maiden Castle for the 1st trial run of what will soon become the new Durham parkrun. The course and surroundings were appreciated by all those who I spoke to and Dougie took some great photo’s to mark the occasion.

The course starts on the running track and consists of an almost full lap of the track, before crossing over to the cricket pitch for a clockwise loop and then crossing the wooden bridge over to the football and rugby pitches for one long loop, then following the riverside path all the way along to Baths bridge, crossing and finishing at the Durham Ox statue just before the bandstand.

Alister makes the Parkrun announcements Although it’s a slight shame that the course doesn’t start and finish at the same point, it’s only a 10 minute walk or a 5 minute warm up or down run from start to finish and nobody seemed to mind. The results below were taken using a free app on my phone so I hope they’re OK!

We’ll be running another trial run this Saturday, 30th July hopefully with the official parkrun kit but if not then we’ll just run the same fully unofficial trial once again. This will give marshalls and volunteers practise and get other 9am riverbank users used to us being there regularly. Please also don’t forget to register first at www.parkrun.com – this is free and only needs to be done once. Durham parkrun will be barcode only from day 1. If you do want to come, to volunteer or run, please let me know so that I know how many people to expect. We don’t want to be inundated just yet! I should also point out that Sunderland parkrun still had 83 runners, and at least one Strider ran there for the first time, even with all the Striders who ran at Durham so it doesn’t look like we’re affecting that too badly thank goodness. As for the official Durham parkrun start date, we hope to start officially in the middle of August assuming we can get all the necessary paperwork etc signed off. Watch this space!

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