Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

On the 11th January 2025 I ran the Great Notley parkrun which was the 490th event held at the venue, my 220th parkrun and 138th different course I'd attended. On New Year's Day Foordy and I ran the Chelmsford parkrun. At most events there is a tarpaulin which visitors use to place coats and bags and suchlike whilst the event takes place. This feature of a parkrun event is caused the 'tarp of trust' and after the Chelmsford event Foordy collected his coat unaware that his front door key had somehow fallen out along the way  He contacted the volunteer team and as luck would have it, they'd found his set of keys and so he arranged to pick them up, but me being me had to make things difficult and so something relatively straightforward ended up being something not quite so. Essentially I was looking to protect my tourist streak, running Chelmsford parkrun again two weeks after I'd visited would have reset my tourist streak from 58 to 2. I'd recently cut it from...

On the 4th January 2025 I ran the Black Park parkrun which was the 746th event held at the venue, my 219th parkrun and 137th different course I'd attended. With the weather changing quite dramatically and temperatures dropping, we've entered into cancellation season and so some last minute adjustments to the schedule are advisory, and plans B, C and D are a sensible necessity. The original plan was to travel down to the south coast and run Littlehampton Prom, but as the previous event was cancelled it put the event number out of sync and would have meant repeating an event number had we visited it. As I know Foordy has a preference for flat coastal events plan B was Southsea in Portsmouth but a combination of the weather and a dodgy Hamstring changed the plans again. Foordy had been feeling a bit of tightness in his hamstring and wasn't sure that going full beams on an out and back was a good idea. He suggested a trail course that with the cold temperatures would be firm u...

On the 1st January 2025 I ran the Chelmsford Central parkrun which was the 562nd event held at the venue, my 218th parkrun and 136th different course I'd attended. 2024 was quite a year for me in parkrun terms. I had run a parkrun every Saturday throughout the calendar year and would have had the full set had it not been for one thing - Oliver's 18th birthday. I tried my best, but it wasn't to be. Could we celebrate Oliver's 18th birthday as well as keeping my parkrun streak in tact? In fact, I hadn't missed a parkrun event on a Saturday morning since August 2023 and had my original suggestion been followed we would have successfully combined both.  We had decided to celebrate Oliver's birthday by enjoying a weekend away with three of Oliver's best buddies. Originally I'd suggested Krakow in Poland. Stephanie and I could enjoy the Christmas markets and festivities whilst the boys could get acquainted with vodka and enjoy the nightlife. Krakow has a coup...