Running and running

November 13 & 16 2016

As if standing around in the freezing rain on Saturday marshalling parkrun because there weren’t enough volunteers wasn’t madness enough, I was up and out early on Sunday for another running event too. This time it was junior parkrun at Riverside Park. Obviously, I wasn’t taking part. It has been more years than I care to remember since I qualified for a 4-14 year old’s event and even back then I didn’t do running. My main reason for going, other than to see what it was all about, was to keep Kylie company. 

Like the big boy’s and girl’s parkrun, junior parkrun depends on volunteers to set up, pack away, marshal, give out tokens, scan barcodes, click timers and generally organise everything. Sadly, volunteers, especially for the position of Run Director (the chief organiser and downloader of times etc) are rather thin on the ground.* Kylie was going along to learn the ropes with a view to Run Directing in the future. The promise of a coffee with her afterwards may have also had something to do with my presence.

So there I was, way earlier than is natural on a Sunday morning, marching across Riverside Park crunching through all the newly fallen leaves a little unsure where the start actually was. Luckily I saw a family in running gear and followed them to the far side of the park near Woodmill Lane and the tennis courts. Kylie was already there when I arrived, along with Sarah, who was Run Director and her husband Paul who was hefting things about.

The set up was like a scaled down version of the grown up parkrun, just 2k to run instead of 5k and a teeny tiny finish funnel. There was also an organised warm up led by Sarah. Sensibly I stood well back and took photos of all the arm swininging, leg stretching stuff. Kylie gamely joined in. The children looked like they were having a whale of a time. The adults not quite so much.

After a swift pre race briefing, they were off, hordes of young ones galloping across the park. While they were running I chatted to Sarah, Paul, Maria and Kylie. It turns out the downloading and token sorting stuff that always seems to take forever at the Hawthorns after parkrun on Saturday morning, is all much simpler for junior parkrun and is done at home. The biggest difference though, is the extra emphasis on safety. Before each run the Run Director and helpers walk the whole course checking for and removing such lovely things as dog poo and broken glass. Unlike adults, the littleies are less observant about these things and more likely to tread in, slip on or fall onto them.

It wasn’t long before the swiftest youngsters were running through the finish funnel and, pretty soon, it was all done and dusted. Obviously, there was still all the packing up to do but, with a far smaller course, this was slightly less time consuming than the adult parkrun.

Now it was time for Kylie and I to find somewhere to have coffee. Originally I’d thought of the coffee and ice cream shop at the Triangle but, earlyish on a Sunday morning, it wasn’t open. Neither was anywhere else serving coffee in the vicinity. In the end we decided to drive into town and get coffee there. Kylie’s car, was parked in the Woodmill Activity Centre car park as she’s a member of Active Nation. The back gates to the mill we open as we arrived and, having a proper member with me meant I could go inside for a look. We didn’t stay long because the coffee was calling but it was great to see the building and the river from a different perspective. With any luck I may be able to persuade her to get me on to those activity centre trails at some point in the future.

* click HERE if you  would like to find out more about junior parkrun or would be interested in volunteering.

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