Great Lines parkrun - various

My parkrun journey started with the Great Lines event on the 19th July 2014, it was the 41st event that the venue had held. Since then I've ran the course a further 13 times over the past 8 years, across three different iterations of the layout.

I wrote my first retrospective last week when I covered the Bear Creek Greenbelt parkrun, but it was a close one between that and where the story began chronologically, in Gillingham, Kent and the Great Lines event.

Mum and Dad had been introduced to parkrun by their friends Glyn and Shona and had been along to the Great Lines on a couple of occasions. On my first event I finished a respectable 163rd out of 188 runners with a time of 33:49. This was sandwiched between Glyn and Shona who were miles up the field and shortly ahead of Mum and Dad. Dad had run slower to keep mum company, he was still in relatively good shape back then!

The run was on the original course which isn't too dissimilar to its current iteration. The start was to the right of the footpath next to the football pitches as you face the Black Lion sports centre to the north. The start has subsequently been displaced slightly, moving fractionaly further back due south. Either way, runners head gently downhill towards the exit of the park and turn left following the line of trees to the side of the football pitch. This is followed all the way along the touchline before turning left again 90 degrees and returning south.

Running along the football pitches you are on grass, which is partly banked and can be diverted slightly if you want to take the marginally more indirect route. Once you reach another line of trees you turn left before turning right off the grass and onto a hard stone path shortly after. This path takes you further south and runs up the long main drag towards the war memorial which looms in the distance.

The change in surface was always notable to me, I have never really enjoyed running on grass as it feels more effort is required. But the psychological boost is soon replaced with the mental battle of running up the hill to the war memorial which teases you slightly with a short leveling off around half way up before increasing again. This part of the course is wide open to the elements and can be made even tougher by strong headwinds.

At the top you take a fork in the path to the right and head towards the war memorial which is large and imposing in its prominent position looking over Chatham, Rochester and beyond. It's worth making the effort to walk back up after the event to take a look around. It's a great piece of local history and architecture and should be appreciated. After the war memorial the path dips sharply downwards before turning 90 degrees left again shortly after. This turn should be taken with relative caution as it can catch you by surprise.

On Christmas Day, 2021 I ran the alternative, post COVID course which carried on down this path instead of taking the sharp left turn. The path got ever steeper, which was good fun running down, but at the bottom it turned sharply left again and runners faced a vertical wall of a path that brought you all the way back up to the opposite side of the war memorial. 

As the course is a two lapper this hill was very hard work, especially second time around. But the original course and the variation of it that is run today misses this out (phew!). As mentioned above, runners take a left shortly after running downhill to the right of the war memorial. This path then heads east before zigzagging upwards back upon itself and brings you back to the top of the course via a more gentle, drawn out approach.

At this point, at the top of the course is where the major changes occur. The first iteration of the course rejoined the main path that brought you up the hill but in reverse. This meant than runners would be running by one another as the faster runners were completing their laps as other were half way around their own.

I loved this path! Again psychology being key. Once you reached the top for the second time you knew that the rest was a long downhill sprint and you could pick up a bit of pace for a grandstand finish. But after COVID, to ensure that the course was run in the safest possible way they diverted runners away from the path and onto the grass that sits alongside it to the right. This does give the figure of eight course a more rounded look to it, but it changes the overall speed and characteristics by doubling the grass surface area runners have to use.

Following the fence of the neighbouring school runners run downhill, back towards the second line of trees before a quick left and a right following the path that sits alongside the start. On the second lap, runners keep going and following the route again as per the first lap.

The most recent iteration of the course has another slight tweak to the hill on the opposite side of the course as you head back up past the war memorial. Instead of taking the zigzagging path runners take a short-cut half way along that is a smaller sharp upward climb. The aim of the shortcut is to reduce the course length back down to mandatory distance, as the moving of the downward section that follows the school fence is a slightly longer route than following the favoured path.

Whether they eventually revert the course back to its original spec, time will tell - variety being the spice of life and all that. Plus it's a nice discussion point when talking about the course as we'll all have different feelings about each course, good and bad.

After my first event in 2014 I returned another six times that year and set an eventual PB of 29:39. Five further visits in 2016 never got me anywhere close to that time. Nor did the Christmas Day visit five years later. It wasn't until my most recent visit in April of this year, to celebrate Shona's 250th event that I managed to set a new PB for the course which stands now at 28:28.

I always enjoy running the Great Lines course, for sentimental reasons. I consider the Cyclopark event my home event, but the Great Lines course is my spiritual home as that's where it all started.