North Walsham parkrun
Norfolk, England
With Winter in effect in the UK, I made a cold visit to North Walsham, where the grey skies and squelchy muddy fields were more than offset by a warm welcome from the team of volunteers. Plenty of people were dressed for Christmas - as in, Santa and reindeer hats, rather than Sunday Best - and the fields weren’t as muddy to run on as they looked. It’s all positivity from here!
The course is significantly easier to go round than to explain, due in no small part to the amount of work the team put in to setting up the course. Regular cones on either side of the path to take, a section taped off to make sure we run next to the path (leaving the path for other park users) and the yellow flags, above, to mark the finishing straight (actually a right-angle).
The start is in a corner of the field, near the school buildings. It’s mostly on the fields, which definitely have mud potential but today were squelchy, perhaps occasionally slippery but generally pretty good. Either drainage is doing its job, or its yet to be churned up in the soggy weather.
Both the briefings (first-timers and for-everyone) were slick but covered everything. There was a reminder that under 11s should run with an adult, which I reckoned a couple of people continued to play fast and loose with, so there was a slight whiff of entitlement from a tiny minority, albeit no actual problems.
I parked in the New Road car park, recommended on the course page, and just £1.20 for two hours, but others were local or made use of the Lidl car park right next door. I could leave the car where it was as I shopped afterwards - busy but surprisingly queue-free for the last Saturday before Christmas. North Walsham continued to be friendly as a gentleman laughingly pointed to my shorts and reminded me it was winter.
The course is very simple, but you do have to run past the finish, likely at a point when others are finishing, which confused a first-timer. On my last loop I was looking around trying to gauge my progress against people I knew were near, and couldn’t spot one - turns out they’d hit the finish early and still couldn’t work out how they’d gone wrong when I got there. But if that’s your worst problem on a Saturday morning, life is good.
Results from North Walsham parkrun #143, 21/12/24; 94 finishers
If you have already completed your review on the day you did it, it must be a quiet day in the Matthews household! Have a good Christmas and hope you find a new Christmas day event.