I’ve had Rugby in mind for a long time as the main exemplar of a town in England I had never visited, so that reason alone made my visit a happy one before anything else. I was staying on a campsite nearby (Dog Lane Fishery - yes, you can fish as well/instead) so as to visit the micro-festival Songfest (indoors, friendly, afternoons only but jammed full; highly recommended!). Without any running I had a weekend filled with angst, self-discovery and a baseball playing spider.
Rugby parkrun is at Whinfield Recreation Ground, East of town. The junior parkrun (to which I headed on Sunday morning) is a little way South of that. Both are tucked neatly into their respective areas, with the 5k spreading round the different fields while the junior one does not need to, with the GEC rec ground more or less 1km round.
The 5k has a mixture of surfaces, as the pictures show. The start is on a path, though you may need to use the grass next to it early on, while everyone’s sorting themselves out. There’s also some trail-type paths, and some grass.
And there’s a hill! It’s regarded as very different in Summer compared to Winter (thanks, David!), and I imagine the grass can be much harder going, the hill even more so. Two laps means you’ll run the hill twice, and it’s about 250m of grind. Certainly the second time round it was a grind, anyway.
It’s a lovely run, with decent facilities - just about enough parking for the numbers we had, with a few along the side of the car park, and probably one or two temporarily parking in the road. A polite notice asks you to use the car park rather than the road, which is handy in making a visitor ignore the open empty spaces on that road, and giving confidence that there is a car park up the end of what is a very residential space. But it does allow for an overflow in extremis.
I’m glad I ran it on a warm, sunny day, though.
Results from Rugby parkrun #311, 17/8/24; 205 finishers
I visited Rugby in December 2017 on a day when parkruns all around us were cancelling. We arrived with plenty of time to find another if necessary, but I'm glad we didn't have to!
You probably had a better overall experience, we were so cold that we couldn't wait to get back in the car to get the heating on. There was a big dumping of snow the next day.