Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

On the 24th September 2022 I ran the Kingdom parkrun which was the 107th event held at the venue, my 96th parkrun and 31st different course I'd attended. This week I was due to run the Folkestone parkrun event, but was changed as detailed in my last update . This swap in the schedule was not only fortunate due to the great weather at Folkestone last week but meant that I could run Kingdoms 107th event and tick a prime number off in the process. Not sure I have done my planning well enough if things like this accidentally happen as they should certainly happen by design. Attempting to tick off parkruns by letters of the alphabet might seem a little obsessive to the outsider. But my argument is that without these obsessive type of interests I'd never have the experience of running events like Kingdom which are absolute gems in the parkrun event portfolio. And my experience of running these events enhances my appreciation for the organisation and for those who volunteer each week...

On the 17th September 2022 I ran the Folkestone parkrun which was the 350th event held at the venue, my 95th parkrun and 30th different course I'd attended. As a one car family I've only been able to tour this year due to an arrangement of convenience we've established with my in-laws. Every Friday we've driven off to the in-laws house, picked up my father-in-law's car and Stephanie has used that to perform taxi services for the children on Saturday mornings whilst I've used our car to drive to my various parkrun venues. I had planned to run Kingdom parkrun this week where I was looking to tick off my 'K' and meet up with Jennie and Tom Grimes who I'd last met up with at East Grinstead , but due to a late change of circumstances I had to swap plans around and run Folkestone this week and Kingdom next. Due to my father-in-law having a fishing trip, he needed his car this week and with Folkestone easily accessible by public transport it made sense to ...

On the 10th September 2022 I ran the Nonsuch parkrun which was the 501st event held at the venue, my 94th parkrun and 29th different course I'd attended. On the Thursday before parkrun the world received the news that our Queen, Her Royal Highness Elizabeth II had passed away at the age of 96. The UK would be in a period of national mourning and multiple sporting events had been cancelled as a mark of respect, including all football matches across every level, including grassroots. Fortunately the parkrun organisation decided against a blanket cancellation policy and left it to landowners and local representatives to determine the outcome on an event by event basis. There were inevitably multiple cancellations as courses such as Dartford, a community asset was using the bandstand as a location to receive floral tributes and wouldn't be able to run safely. I had planned to run Nonsuch parkrun, chasing the letter N to help complete my goal of running a different parkrun for ever...

On the 3rd September 2022 I ran the Pegwell Bay parkrun which was the 414th event held at the venue, my 93rd parkrun and 28th different course I'd attended. Options for the letter P are fairly few and far between from where I live, and with the dual aim of completing all the parkruns in Kent alongside the parkrun alphabet, Pegwell Bay was the perfect venue that fulfilled both criteria. Research had told me that the course was going to be flat and fast, and rumours of the course being slightly short of the official 5k required were plentiful online across various parkrun tourism groups on Facebook. I'm admittedly not a fast runner and wouldn't consider myself anyway athletic. I started parkrun with times of around 34-36 minutes and it has taken a lot of effort to get times down to a level I'm starting to feel pride in. My quickest ever parkrun time was registered earlier this year at the Cyclopark event which was the culmination in many weeks of repeated visits and slow...

On the 27th August 2022 I ran the East Grinstead parkrun which was the 189th event held at the venue, my 92nd parkrun and 27th different course I'd attended. The last time I visited East Grinstead was to pay a visit to my Nan who was in hospital having her wedding finger surgically removed. She was on a ward of females having a variety of cosmetic procedures. My grandfather, fondly know as Gramps teased the patients that were in the ward with her. Pointing to a lady who had a rather excessive bossum he said 'she's here to have her boobs reduced'. Looking around and pointing to a woman on the other side of the ward he said 'and she's having hers made bigger'. As I'm sliding down my chair getting redder and redder he says 'they should go in together, swap and save a few bob'. More than twenty-five years have passed since that moment and I finally felt comfortable returning to East Grinstead without being recognised. I needed to collect an 'E...

On the 20th August 2022 I ran the Squerreys Winery parkrun which was the 79th event held at the venue, my 91st parkrun and 26th different course I'd attended. We are fortunate in Kent to not only have a number of different parkrun events, but events that consist of contrast and points of difference. Whether that's the hills and elevation of Lullingstone or the flat out and back routes of The Leas and Deal & Walmer you can find a wide variation of everything in-between. Of the 24 events in Kent I had done until Saturday exactly half of them and hope to visit the other half by the end of the year starting with Saturday's event at Squerreys Winery . I had been keen to attend this event ever since I'd first heard about it. Not necessarily for the run, but the fact that on the same site was a local brewery with the chance to pick up some craft beer alongside a shiny new PB. In the week leading up to the event, my friend Bartek had finally succumbed to my relentless e...

On the 13th August 2022 I ran the Monsal Trail parkrun which was the 147th event held at the venue, my 90th parkrun and 25th different course I'd attended. When we were planning our week to the Peak District the parkrun enroute pretty much picked itself ( see my last post ), whereas the parkrun on the homeward bound journey could have been one of many. We knew that we needed to head to Liverpool from our accommodation near Buxton where we were heading via the long way home. Gillingham were playing Tranmere and so whilst we were in the reasonable vicinity it made sense at the time (event if it didn't at the full-time whistle!).  From our accommodation to the North West there are an abundance of parkruns to choose from. As there also are to the south with Trentham Gardens and the Isabel Trail coming highly recommend. The latter also having the added bonus of being one of the rare runs that start with 'i'. We could also have selected Ashbourne which is a relatively new...

On the 6th August 2022 I ran the Jersey Farm parkrun which was the 119th event held at the venue, my 89th parkrun and 24th different course I'd attended. Completing parkrun challenges is not as easy as you might think. For example, it's actually impossible to complete a parkrun beginning with X, to get a Y you have to go to York, or hope that Yeovil bring back their elapsed event. To complete a parkrun beginning with Z you have to travel to Holland or Poland. The letter J is not much better with events few and far between, so when the opportunity to arose to tick of Jersey Farm from my parkrun list I was going to take it! With summer holidays fast approaching and nothing in the diary Stephanie and I asked the kids what they all wanted to do during the six weeks off. Each one of them said the same thing, "Alton Towers", so we formed a plan! As with most plans these days, they only really work when a parkrun is included. Or in this case, two! In order to make the most ...

On the 30th July 2022 I ran the Thurrock parkrun which was the 285th event held at the venue, my 88th parkrun and 23rd different course I'd attended. My parkrun planner is not through random choice, it is carefully considered. Crafted around ticking events off the alphabet list, ticking events off in Kent and ticking off those inside the M25. I also consider the event numbers as well to ensure that I am ticking off numeric challenges such as prime numbers, Fibonacci sequence or if I'm feeling extra technical ticking off numbers from the Wilson Index (I don't actually know why the Wilson Index is called the Wilson Index or who it is named after. It is however, the maximum contiguous number of events that I've attended, in my case 3. If I run an event that is number 4, my Wilson Index will go up to 16 on account that I've run event numbers 5 through to 16 and number 4 is the gap in my sequence. Glad we cleared that one up...) The other factor that I consider and I bel...

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 ...