Örebro parkrun, Sweden
Starting from Oset and Rynningeviken, to the East of the city, the parkrun is an easy walk from town. Walking there alongside the canal was a highlight of my morning, and the meanders don't add much to the distance - I turned a 2.5km walk into a 4km one by heading South to the canal and walking round the castle before I went East.
You can walk on either side of the water with no worry about getting stuck - there's a bridge right by the start of the run. It is surprising how quickly your surroundings change from urban to country as you move East out of town, and good for the soul on any morning, though I particularly enjoyed the fact that it was warm and therefore pausing to look around didn't mean getting cold.
I passed a few toilets by the canal, but didn't check to see if they were open. I think some used the ones at the Naturens hus, 100m from the start, before the event. Certainly the cafe was open afterwards for drinks and food.
This being Sweden, and in the EU, various things are banned, and no one has any common sense, so we had only the loosest explanation of the course and then everyone set off running in circles before working out that a straight line would be best. Meanwhile, back in the glorious UK, the barriers of annoying civil servants who insist on the truth have been further weakened, and the government is able to pretend in an official press release that the EU banned the pint symbol and that the notion of "common sense" is going to stand up to more than a second's scrutiny and will serve as the basis for law (as QC Joshua Rosenberg put it when talking about the human rights rhetoric/bill "Promises to end abuse and restore common sense are political rhetoric that deserve no place in a briefing note of this sort"). Bless them, that brain drain has kicked in *awfully* quickly. It's also possible to now see a clip of Johnson arriving in front of a crowd of royalists to loud boos, only with the boos removed. Pravda are in town to take lessons, apparently.
The contrast is stark in a country that isn't trying to pretend that there are benefits where there are not. In reality we had a lovely briefing in two languages, and no one felt that running 5km was a tyranny that would be fixed by calling it 3.1miles or 24.86 furlongs. It's a one lap course, with the first and last bit the same, and plenty of time to look out over the water.
The course heads through trees before soon opening up with water on the right as it heads into the nature reserve. That first section is pretty shaded but after that it's mostly open to the weather, which made for a warm run on a summery day.
At the finish, sitting by the water I could hear several birds singing, and a cuckoo making merry that punctuated the rest. It's pretty idyllic.
