I was chatting to a first timer (at Bognor) on Saturday morning prior to the start and she looked pretty fit/speedy. She also looked a little older than myself so wondered if she’d made the ideal choice starting on the front line.
This wasn’t a problem - she finished fourth overall in 20 minutes dead. Our (Bognor Regis) course is easily 30 seconds slower than a fast course because of tight turns and overtaking on the multiple laps but she was quick.
Turns out she’s VW60-64 and got an age grade of over 95%
I think as you get older the calculations are less accurate as there aren’t as many people pushing for official world records (where the age grade scores are calculated from) so there are some examples of over 100%. Here’s another example, but with a male…
Back on the tourist trail today, went to Hamsterley forest. Lovely little trail run with a decent bit of climbing for 5k and a couple of little descents on the MTB tracks.
One of my favourite routes and a fairly small event. Fairly steady pace and just over 23 minutes but still fifth.
Just annoying about the ankle, it was on a fairly flat bit where I was on cruise instead of concentrating on the terrain
Died a death on km 4 today. Pulled it back together for the last one but cost me 30 or so seconds.
Also saw that Battersea had its first event today. Any London based TTers up for next week? Number were around 250 today, now the cat’s out of the bag that’ll be over 1000 very quickly.
Took it really gently this morning as I’m doing an 8k cross country race at 2:30pm. Pi$$ed with rain during the run but was still enjoyable. Whilst my road shoes dry out I’ll be packing XC or trail shoes for this afternoon.
I’m not sure that the non-running locals are that happy about Parkrun coming to Battersea Park.
One of the main car parks is being closed until 10:30 to accommodate it. I don’t know how the council square the loss of parking revenue for a free event that presumably isn’t paying to be there
Pretty easy for a council to square restricting cars for health benefits, have you even heard of Greta? But not convinced it’s actually a good idea for them either, did they also drop some of the Sri Chinmoy races 'cos of parkrun?
Yeah, there’s the Sri Chimnoy races and quite a few charity races that happen there on a Saturday. I assume they’ve all been kicked out or moved to Sunday .
Those races run with quite large numbers without closing the car park, so I don’t know what Parkrun is doing differently that means that they have to close it
