Mud, swans, photo bombing coots and funnel duckers

4 February 2017

Parkrun was brought to us this week by damp, mud, steaming runners and a photo bombing coot or two. It was also freezing cold but I’m getting used to that now. The talk of the day was breaking records. The parkruns at Lymington, Winchester and Eastleigh were cancelled and, from the outset, it was clear there were a lot more people on Southampton Common than normal. It looked as if the record attendance of nine hundred and forty two might well be broken. 

Without actually counting everyone on the start line, it was impossible to tell If records would be broken or not but it looked like it was going to be a close thing.  Usually I trot off somewhere to get a coffee while everyone is running but, today, I’d decided to do something different. Once Run Director, Kate, had set everyone off, I tramped across the muddy grass towards Cemetery Lake.

A pair of swans were waiting for me on the lake. They looked at me expectantly for a moment, probably thinking ‘where’s the bread.’ With freezing fingers I fumbled for my phone to take a photo. By the time I’d got it out of my pocket a cheeky coot had decided to swim into the picture and photo bomb it. He seemed to be saying, ‘look at me, I’m much more interesting than those silly swans.’

After a while I gave up on getting photos of the swans alone and moved along the bank. The swans, not entirely convinced I didn’t have some bread hidden somewhere about my person, followed. After a few shots of the coots on the bank with the swans in the background and one final attempt at lone swans, which still had that pesky coot in it, I moved on. It was too cold to be standing still.

At first I thought I’d walk down to Cemetery Road and loop back towards the finish line, thus avoiding all the runners. The Common is riddled with little, half hidden trails, most of which I’ve never walked. Before I’d gone very far I came upon one and, on a whim, decided to follow it. It looked to be nice firm gravel and I thought it might be one of the side trails running off the short cut we often take with the lovely wooded glade. I set off in good spirits. There’s nothing like an unexplored trail to put a smile on my face.

The trail led me past a small, stagnant pond, bright with vivid green algae. After that the gravel ran out and  things got a bit muddy. I should have known there’d be no avoiding the mud, at least not for long. Then I came to a small board bridge over a little rill, perhaps running off from the pond.

In the end it wasn’t quite the trail I’d expected. Rather than leading me to the glade and out onto the path below the Hawthorns Cafe, it ended very abruptly not far from the infamous bag tree. Runners were already crossing the finish line so it was probably just as well the trail had ended up being a shortcut.

Not sure if commando had finished or not, I scanned the crowd for him. Then Adam came sprinting up the finish straight and I knew Commando would be right behind him. Sure enough he was.

As soon as he’d crossed the line and joined the token queue I waited for a gap in the runners then headed off across the field towards the scanners. It’s never an easy job finding him amongst the crowds in the funnel and around the scanners but today, with so many runners, I really had my work cut out. The field was chockablock with hot, tired runners, steaming gently in the cold morning air.

As soon as his barcode was scanned, Commando went off to help out with funnel management. With all the extra runners plus fifty six parkrun tourists, and fifty one first time parkrunners, funnel ducking was a real problem and it took a concerted effort from all the volunteers to make sure everyone stayed in line to pick up their token.

When you’ve just run 5K, it may feel like a bit of a pain to wait in line to collect a token but  there’s a good reason for it. At the finish line there are two timers, each clicking a special stopwatch every single time someone crosses the line. This is the first part of the process to record everyone’s finish time. At the end of the funnel each runner is given a numbered token to record their finish position. The token is collected and, along with the runner’s barcode (if they have one) is then scanned by the scanners. Later the Run Director logs all this information onto a computer which matches up barcodes, token numbers and times giving everyone their finish time. If someone ducks out of the funnel, changes places in the line or refuses to take a token, it doesn’t just mess up their time, it messes up everyone’s time and gives the Run Director a huge headache trying to sort it all out.

In the end, it wasn’t quite a record breaking parkrun, even if there were a record number of funnel duckers to give poor Kate a headache. It was close though, nine hundred and twenty seven runners in all. Now all there was left to do was pack everything away, sort the tokens into numeric order, input all the information onto the computer, check it, fix any anomalies, upload it to the parkrun website and have a coffee.

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