Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

On the 23rd July 2022 I ran the Hoblingwell parkun which was the 198th event held at the venue, my 87th parkrun and 22nd different course I'd attended. Having not run for nearly three weeks aside from an attempted run at the Warszawa-Praga event two weeks ago I was nervous about resuming running activity. Judging when your body is ready is not an easy task, particularly when your not accustomed to niggly running injuries and are generally impatient by nature. My parkrun planner has been carefully curated to find a blended mixture between alphabet achievements, ticking events off inside the M25, completing all the parkuns in Kent and working through the list of nearest events not done yet (NENDY'S). Ironically, after my injury the next event scheduled was Hoblingwell. An event inside the M25, third on my NENDY list and inside a little pocket of parkuns which I'd already completed and made sense for me to tick off.  Indeed, I'd also been hobbling very well recently! I h...

On the 16th July 2022 I volunteered at the Cyclopark parkun which was the 87th event held at the venue, the third time I'd volunteered at the event and my 8th and 9th volunteer credits overall. As I'd injured my calf at Lullingstone two weeks ago and hadn't quite recovered at last week's event in Warsaw I gave myself some extended time off from running to give myself some time to heal and recuperate. I'm not a very patient person in general and have hated not sticking to the routine I'd spent a long time getting used to. I had severe blisters in the autumn last year which taught me trying to do something too soon can ultimately mean being out for longer than necessary, so this time around I'm more determined to do the right thing. Whilst my Wednesday wellbeing run (we get an hour extra break on Wednesdays to do something for our mental health at work) is difficult to find suitable alternatives. Parkrun Saturdays are straightforward - instead of running an e...

On the 9th July 2022 I ran the Warszawa-Praga parkun which was the 408th event held at the venue, my 86th parkrun and 21st different course I'd attended. Being a parkrun obsessive means looking at any opportunity to fit in an event when there's a possibility to do so. In fact, having a parkrun event can be the difference between either going somewhere or not. In this case, we were fortunate because we had a choice between a number of cities who all had parkruns nearby. Stephanie and I for a number of years have wanted to see Coldplay, who are one of my all time favourite bands. Absolutely everyone I know who has seen them have all said that they are supremely special live. So when tickets went on sale for their Music of the Spheres World Tour we jumped at the chance of securing our tickets. The problem was, the tickets for Wembley were really expensive. By way of an experiment I compared prices for some of the other European cities on the tour and found that the prices were mu...

On the 2nd July 2022 I ran the Lullingstone parkun which was the 305th event held at the venue, my 85th parkrun and 20th different course I'd attended. When researching different parkrun events for tourism purposes there's a sublist of events that sit under the term 'must visit'. Whilst each event is unique in its own right there are certain events that have a special characteristic that make them stand out from the rest. In the case of Lullingstone it's the events reputation as one of the UKs toughest courses that make people travel from all over the country in order to conquer it's proven challenge. For me, it was the lure of the challenge, but also the fact that I needed an 'L' as part of the alphabet challenge, it's also a Kentish run I'd not completed and it was number two on my NENDY list (Nearest Event Not Done Yet). It was also a course that my Dad had previously run and so I had a subconscious goal of wanting to beat his time - which sa...

On the 25th June 2022 I ran the Swanley parkun which was the 34th event held at the venue, my 84th parkrun and 19th different course I'd attended. I've been to Swanley many times, mostly to the White Oak Leisure centre to enjoy the flumes and diving boards before the council built a new modern facility that features neither of those things. But until yesterday I'd never been to the park - evidently I'd been missing out. Swanley park contains an abundance of family friendly activities from a boating lake, extensive play apparatus, paddling pool and mini-railway. Stephanie had been before with the children when Oliver was younger but I was there for none of those things. Like last week at Mote Park my scheduled visit was planned to coincide with the event number matching one of the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence - this time around being the number 34. I've now completed the first 8 of the 14 numbers listed in the challenge with other events planned for later in t...

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 ...

On the 18th June 2022 I ran the Mote Park parkun which was the 3rd event held at the venue, my 83rd parkrun and 18th different course I'd attended. I use the massively helpful 5K Achievements App for keeping record of my parkrun activities, planning future visits and accessing course event page information to understand more about various routes and how to get to the event. This resource is usually updated once a week, bringing enhancements to the app and updating the library of courses. On a recent update to the app a new purple icon appeared on the map feature and a new parkrun for Kent was born. Mote Park by all accounts had been attempting to start a parkrun for a number of years without much success. I'm not entirely sure what had changed, nor why. But I was enthused to see that a new event was coming to Kent and I was keen to attend as soon as possible. What wasn't clear however was when the inaugural event would take place. I suspected that it would start on Jubilee...

On the 26th March 2022 I ran the Bear Creek Greenbelt parkun which was the 63rd event held at the venue, my 71st parkrun and 9th different course I'd attended. It was also the first event that I had ran overseas. When looking back at the other venues that I had ran at the time of writing this, there was only really one place to start when looking to write a retrospective.  In 2020, I had a milestone birthday and as a gift Mum and Dad offered to take Stephanie and I to Texas so that we could watch the US Grand Prix in Austin. The original plan was to base ourselves out of San Antonio and drive up to the circuit on qualifying and race day. However, the global pandemic put pay to that idea and despite attempts to reschedule we wasn't able to go in 2021 either. Due to the booking conditions of our accommodation in San Antonio we had to rebook by April 2022, so we did. Instead of a week of sporting tourism, we had a Texas roadtrip to look forward to instead. As the itinerary change...

On the 11th June 2022 I ran the Greenwich parkun which was the 584th event held at the venue, my 82nd parkrun and 17th different course I'd attended. The biggest impediment to my parkrun tourist ambitions is lack of access to a car. So I've devised a list of venues that I can access by train should a car be out of reach. I've come to a sort of agreement whereby on Friday evenings we borrow the in-laws second car and then we drop it straight back on a Saturday morning after parkrun. But with them enjoying another well earned cruise I wasn't sure whether this arrangement would work this week. So I planned to go by train to New Eltham from Gravesend and walk the short distance to Avery Hill park where the Greenwich event is held. As it worked out in the end, the prior arrangement stuck and I was left with a dilemma of sticking to my plan or choosing an alternative venue and saving Greenwich for a rainy day when no access to a car was definite. To make life easier for myse...

On Saturday 4th June 2022 I ran the Queen Elizabeth parkrun , which was the 407th time that this particular event had been held. It was also my 81st parkrun at my 16th different event and was by far my most enjoyable. I enjoyed the event so much that I've found my way back to my blog to write all about it! Since I last wrote a blog post, a whole load of everything has changed. The global pandemic caused a seismic shift in how we live and go about our lives that recounting everything would take more than a blog or two. I should probably take a few minutes and re-read what I wrote back then and to see how much of it resonates. But I digress, this post is about my parkrun journey and a new obsession which I want to document for safe-keeping. My first parkrun was back in July 2014 when I ran the Great Lines event. Over the subsequent years I had run occasionally at the Great Lines and even did some touristing at Hastings and Bexley , but it wasn't until the Cyclopark event came...

At the end of every year when the clock strikes midnight, a thousand hopes and dreams nestle in the heart as you look forward to the forthcoming twelve months. Holidays, birthdays, plans, milestones and expectations that the year ahead matches the desires that have been joyously painted in the imagination. But as Big Ben struck midnight at the end of 2019, who on earth would have imagined the reality of what the new year had in store, not just for me, but for every person on this earth? This blog was always intended to be a kind of digital keepsake of things that we had done as a family as well as a creative outlet for my writing. But as the years have gone by the habit has worn off and the blog posts have dried up. Appearing less frequently as social media has grown and memories are shared easier and quicker as single snapshots of moments rather than long drawn out waffle of words. But with the world undergoing a global pandemic, this post is an opportunity to record a small personal...

I knew that my Grandfather was special from a very young age. Everyone at school had a Grandad, whereas I had a Gramps. He was the man with the cheeky laugh and smile who used to give us satsumas whenever we visited. I can't peel an orange, or smell the peel without being transported back to Nan and Gramps's house and their dimly lit front room. After the free fruit it was rock cakes. Depending on how high the oven was turned up depended how much your teeth hurt as you bit into one of his sultana filled surprises. Gramps was always generously giving out something or another. Food, bottles of pop or one of his endless supplies of knick-knacks he'd obtained from Readers Digest. In fact Gramps had everything stashed away somewhere. "What do you want one of them for?" He'd say, "I've got one of them". Before disappearing and coming back with whatever it was you'd been talking about. Invariably the item would be brand new, 40 years old, bu...

During my self-imposed blogging sabbatical I started writing several posts, all half-heartedly and never got around to finishing them. I had a look through to see if any were worth saving - then I came across this one. Oliver’s ninth birthday and a trip to the Nou Camp. Now a little out of date contextually, but all finally finished for the record. I’ve long held aspirations to mix two of my favourite things; travel and football. A wannabe tourist if you like of the beautiful game. But life as a Gills fan comes with restrictions, there are no European nights against the continent's finest. The closest we are ever likely to get to any form of foreign opposition is the odd pre-season game in northern France against a local side, which is treated as nothing more than a glorified training session. But last weekend I ticked a big box off of my footballing bucket list, namely a visit to the Nou Camp stadium, home of FC Barcelona. An experience far, far removed from the previous groun...