Brighton & Hove parkrun - event 855

On the 21st June 2025 I ran the Brighton & Hove parkrun which was the 855th event held at the venue, my 241st parkrun and 159th different course I'd attended.

parkrun first started in Bushy way back in 2004 before slowly evolving into the worldwide Saturday phenomenon that it is now. It was originally called the Bushy time trial and before the rebrand to parkrun there were ten time trial events spread over the United Kingdom, with Brighton & Hove being one of them. Naturally there is a challenge within the tourist community to tick them all off and after my visit on Saturday I'd visited exactly half of them.

It was also my third visit to the city to take part in parkrun after already running at the Hove Promenade and Bevendean Down events. There are two more events left to visit at East Brighton and Preston Park and I've completed the set.

My last visit was last January at Hove Promenade on what was quite possibly the coldest parkrun event I'd ever taken part in. This morning was the complete opposite with temperatures rising above 30deg on what was the hottest day of the year so far.

Brighton & Hove parkrun takes part in Hove park in the Goldstone area of the city. Being a football supporter I'm aware of the history of Brighton & Hove Albion football club and their slightly nomadic existence at the turn of the last century. They played their home games at the Goldstone Ground which I discovered was right next to park where parkrun takes place.

Walking around the park to the start before the run commenced I read one of the park history's boards that provides visitors with a bit of backstory to the parks history. I hadn't quite realised that Goldstone was actually that, a Gold Stone and that it was actually present in the park.

In the far south east corner of the park, cordoned off by a fence sits a gigantic rock, with a faint golden hue. I was quite surprised by this revelation and a little bit excited at gaining some knowledge that I had never even considered before. Next to the rock is the formal entrance to park and across the main road that runs adjacent to it sits a retail park made up of your Pets at Home and Nandos. Once the vast Goldstone Ground, home or Brighton and Hove Albion.

A tragedy for football in the city at the time and it was wrong on so many levels what happened or what could have happened to the club. All's well that ends well with the team now flying high in the Premier League and playing at the impressive AMEX stadium on the outskirts of the city. 

The parkrun course passes the former stadium on three occasions as the course is made up of one small lap and two longer ones.

Starting by the toilet block at the South Eastern end of the park participants run anti-clockwise, past the Gold Stone and past the formal entrance to the park. The small loop cuts back across the middle of the park, back to the start where the lap starts again following it's steps, except rather than cutting across the park at half-way the route carries on around the edge of the perimeter of the park on two occasions.

The pathways are nice and wide and are all tarmac which makes for a nice running surface, but the second part of each lap, even the smaller one is a challenge. The western side of the park is at a higher elevation than the east, and it undulates across its whole distance. Whilst not steep and not particularly strenuous in normal weather the heat contributed to a challenging run

In fact the weather had put people off, with almost 100 less participants this week than the week prior. I finished in 280th place out of a field of 397 participants in a time of 31:46.

At the end of the event as I crossed the finish line in a hot sticky mess I was high-fived by a former colleague of mine at James Villas. I'd previously ran with Iain at Tailgate, his home event. Bit like me he had also been touring quite excessively and so it was a real random occurrence that we were both at the same event at the same time. He was telling me about his forthcoming trip to South Africa and his parkrun plans whilst out on a business trip. 

Not that I was jealous or anything...