December Running - Kent Vets, South of the Thames and Xmas parkrun

Kent Veterans/Masters Cross Country

Kent Veterans Cross Country Championships took place on Saturday 3rd December 2016 at Central Park in Dartford. The park, which is just next to the town centre, includes the Dartford Harriers HQ and it was good to see the recently refurbished athletics track there. The cross country course was not the wildest, much of it being run around flat playing fields to the East of the River Darent interspersed with scrambling up and down a bank (as someone said, like an international cross country event without quite the same speed). Still it was a good course for spectators as the runners were never far away. Just over 300 runners took part in the different races.

Map of Dartford course (see Strava)

The men's 40-49 was probably the most exciting, with Blackheath and Bromley's Alex Gibbins hanging on to the shoulder of last year's winner Chris Greenwood (Kent AC) before overtaking him on the finishing stretch. Kent's Phil Sanders was third and  Kent also won the club competition ahead of Medway & Maidstone AC and Tonbridge AC.

Chris Greenwood, Phil Sanders and Alex Gibbins in the lead

The M50-59 race was won by Ben Reynolds whose club Tonbridge AC were also the winning team in the seven mile race. I scored for Kent AC, who came 4th.  Not for the first time I was Mr Median for age (42nd out of 84), I was pleased that overtaking two runners in the last few hundred metres moved us up a place, but also disappointed that I didn't sustain anything like the pace of the previous week's 10K PB which would have comfortably moved us into a medal position.

Alan Camp (Blackheath and Bromley) won the M60 and David Moorekite (Larkfield AC) the M70.

Start of women's and M60 race

In the women's 35-44, Hazel Behagg  (Dartford Road Runners) was first home, with Blackheath and Bromley the winning team.  Maria Heslop (Paddock Wood AC) won the W45-54 ahead of Clare Elms whose Dulwich Runnners picked up the team prize. Victoria Talbot Rosner (Invicta East Kent AC) won the W55 and Sue James (Paddock Wood AC) the W65.

South of the Thames Senior Cross Country

This year's South of the Thames Senior Race was hosted by Kent AC at Beckenham Place Park on 17th December 2016. The Park is the venue for the new Beckenham Place parkun and the finishing line for the summer Assembly League races, but it has been a while since it featured a cross country race on this scale. Sadly the golf course in the park has recently closed down, the silver lining in the 18 hole cloud being the fact that that the whole park is now available for other activities (a lottery-funded regeneration scheme for the park is due to start shortly).  And so 290 runners set off across the former fairways at the start of the two lap, seven mile course.

Men and women run alongside each other in this race, with Phil Wicks (Belgrave Harriers) winning the men's competition ahead of Owen Hind (Kent AC), back in London on a Christmas break from a year running and studying at West Texas A&M University.  John Sanderson (Guildford & Godalming) was third. Amy Clements (Kent AC) won the women's competition, with Lucy Reid (Tonbridge) in 2nd place  and Amy's Team GB 50k colleague Samantha Ahmend (Belgrave Harriers) in 3rd. 

The Colman Cup

For the second year in a a row Kent AC men won the Dewar Shield for the 6-to-score competition, and also won the 12-to-score Colman Cup. Belgrave Harriers won the women's competition, ahead of Kent AC and Dulwich Runners (full results here)

The route - see Strava for more details

I enjoyed running the course, which did feel like a proper rural run even if it was in a South London park half way between Bromley and Lewisham.  There was a substantial hill near the start, followed by a quite technical narrow woodland path with lots of tree roots, and a couple of short but very steep banks to clamber up too.  Not to mention some very fast downhill stretches.

great photo of the race by James Turner

parkrun

I got in a few parkruns over the festive period, including Peckham Rye on Christmas Eve and Hilly Fields on Christmas Day where there there were running Santas and a glass of bubbly at the end. Amidst all the family and feasting it was good to also spend time with this friendly community of runners.

Santa sprints to the finish at Hilly Fields on Christmas Day

I finished off my 2016 running today with the New Year's Eve Brockwell parkrun in Brixton.

So that's the year done, hopefully plenty more running to come in 2017. Have a peaceful and fruitful New Year everybody, long may you run.

Running on Screen (10): Stick Man's Christmas Running Adventure

I've done plenty of running over Christmas, including parkruns at Hilly Fields on Christmas Day and at Peckham Rye on Boxing Day (incidentally there's a good article in today's Independent about parkrun, which features Hilly Fields and mentions my friend, chief cheerleader and Kent AC runner John Barron. See How parkrun became a global phenomenon: The free activity that has changed millions of people's lives by Genevieve Roberts).

Obviously there's more to Christmas than running - there's eating, drinking and watching TV to do too! Not too much athletics on TV at the moment, but there was one excellent running programme on British TV. I refer of course to the film version of Julia Donaldson and Axel Sheffler's children's book, Stick Man.

Truly a cautionary tale for runners everywhere, it starts:

'Stick Man lives in the family tree 

With his Stick Lady Love and their stick children three.

One day he wakes early and goes for a jog

Stick man, oh stick man, beware of the dog'

You see Stick Man and family are sentient beings just like you and I, but out in the world they get mistaken for mere lengths of wood. Stick Man suffers the indignity of a dog playing with him, a swan building her nest with him, being thrown into the river as a pooh stick and put on a fire. Worse still the narrator seems to think he is just jogging, when actually it was a threshold run. Will he ever make it back to the family tree? Thankfully (SPOILER ALERT) Santa comes to the rescue. But he could have saved his family a lot of grief if he'd taken his mobile phone with him when he left for a run.

Previously in the Running on Screen series:

Run Lola Run and running Berlin

Walford Half Marathon (Eastenders)

Race Strategy in The (US) Office
Top of the Lake and The Fall
The Running Man (1987)
Muybridge's Runner, 1887

The Casual Vacancy

From Darkness

London Spy

Winter running 'traditions': of parkruns, paarlauf and muddy spikes

So Christmas and New Year is well and truly over and for the (barely) gainfully employed it's back to work and marathon training. For the second year running I started Christmas Day at Hilly Fields parkrun. I was slow with a sore ankle but was the first finishing reindeer, so I will take it. It was windy and I had to hold on tight to my antlers on the faster downhill sections of the course. I rarely get lapped at Hilly Fields but on this occasion I was just coming to the top of the hill that marks the end of the second lap when I heard thunderous steps coming up behind me- national Inter Counties Fell Running Champion and GB Mountain Runner Shaun Dixon on his way to break the course record followed closely by Paul Martelletti, who ran for GB in the 100 km World Championships in Doha in August 2014.

Christmas fairy at Hilly Fields parkrun

Is Christmas parkrun becoming a new running 'tradition' over the festive period? Well at Hilly Fields there were 121 runners this Christmas compared with 81 the year before and 20 in 2012. Similarly at Dulwich parkun the numbers have risen from 56 in 2012 and 99 in 2013 to 130 in 2014.  

Then there's New Year's Day, the only day in the year in which you can record two parkruns in one day (for the rest of the year all parkruns everywhere in England start at the same time, 9:00 am). I ran at Peckham Rye at 9:00 am, and then Hilly Fields at 10:00 am, while others went from Peckham to Dulwich Park or Southwark Park. Hilly Fields parkrun ended on a sombre note with a runner collapsing at the finish line and being taken to hospital in an ambulance apparently very seriously ill, but glad to say he seems to be recovering.

As with Christmas Day, there's been a steady growth in runners, at least judging by those South London parkruns that took place on New Years Day. 

Another Christmas tradition amongst many athletics clubs is a paarlauf race. Paarlauf is German for 'pair running' but it can be run with larger teams. Essentially it's a relay race, with the difference being that it is entirely up to each team to decide how it covers the distance - there's no fixed leg. At Kent Athletic Club the pre-Christmas paarlauf at Ladywell track consisted of 13 teams of 3 running 16 laps (6400m) between them. My team ran in consecutive 200m sprints, but as we came last that might not have been the best tactic. Others were taking elaborate short cuts across the middle of the track to enable shorter legs or even having the stronger runners run longer distances. All good fun, though running 11 200m sprints with minimal recovery certainly took it out of me.

The final festive tradition must be the first cross country races of January, where many seasonal pristine presents of nice new running shoes are christened in the mud. Saw some lovely looking spikes before the start of the Surrey League at Streatham Common but they all looked much the same colour afterwards.

Oh yes they used to look like this...

Run Run Rudolph: a Christmas run in Hilly Fields

And lo it came to pass that in the depths of the dark midwinter, people came together and looked forward to brighter days to come. As the shortest day passed, they celebrated with their festivals of light, candles and new birth. Saturnalia, Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas... they ate, drank, gave gifts, prayed and performed their various rituals. Oh and they ran around a muddy park in South London on Christmas morning!

81 people turned out yesterday morning for a special Christmas Day Hilly Fields 5k parkrun. Santa hats and the odd set of reindeer antlers were much in evidence (as they were on the 21st December for the last regular Saturday run before Christmas).

As discussed in previous post here about running and the history of Hilly Fields park, there is a modern stone circle there which runners pass as they struggle up one of the two main hills on this circuit. In the middle of it is a stone calendar slab/sundial which marks the Winter Solstice. No doubt if future archaeologists were to come across this they would wonder whether there was some ritual significance in people running round the park in a clockwise/sunwise direction at this time of year, turning from east to west like the sun in the vicinity of a solar temple!

photo from Everything Lewisham