Happy New Year! A bumper period with 5 parkruns in 15 days!
A busy parkrun year and measured by TRC attendance, our 2nd biggest year. Just falling slightly short of our record year in 2019. Our biggest totals (based on the running of our current membership) show that there isn’t much difference between the top 5 years.
| Year | Runs | Weekly Average |
| 2019 | 2278 | 42.2 |
| 2024 | 2241 | 41.5 |
| 2022 | 2227 | 41.2 |
| 2023 | 2111 | 39.1 |
| 2018 | 2111 | 39.1 |
I haven’t been very well recently, hence this catch up and Claire has been building up the hype with the newsletter “A special parkrun Corner will be coming your way very soon….. “ A bit like a compere before the comedian comes on. So I need to make sure I live up to the hype! Actually this round up will be the usual style parkrun-corner round-up but I am also putting together a 2024 review, so that you can see how well you did last year in parkrunland.
The recent weeks have seen some large turnouts. We saved our highest turnout of the year until 21st December where 56 of us ran (also our 4th highest TRC turnout ever). Just 2 short of our all-time record of 58 in 2022). Individual parkruns also saw their highest of the year for TRC attendance with Wendover peaking on the 21st and Gadebridge and Rickmansworth on Christmas Day.
Well done to Ben O’Keeffe who knocked a further 6 seconds off his previous all-time PB with a time of 17:30 at Rickmansworth and to Josh Frewin who knocked a massive 36 seconds off his PB with a time of 17:17 at Rickmansworth. On the ”All-time parkrun PBs” of the club Ben and Josh now rank 7th and 3rd respectively. Great running from both of you!
There were course PBs for Huw Moreton (Aylesbury), Cathy Court and Séverine Robitaille (Dunstable Downs), Séverine Robitaille (Lincoln), Sue Frewin (Millennium Country), Louise Bladen and Josh Frewin (Rickmansworth) and Tim Fryer (Wendover Woods). Well done all.
Congratulations also to Dennis Raffety for running his 300th (Tring 52%, Wendover 37%, Dunstable 7%) and Kevin Dance his 200th (Tring 42%, Houghton Hall 9%, Dunstable 9%)
Podiums for Josh Frewin (2nd at Rickmansworth), Claire Shelley (1st female and 3rd overall at Pymmes), Josh Frewin (3rd at Milton Keynes), Becky Raftery (1st female at Wendover), Louise Bladen (1st and 3rd female at Dunstable) and Lynda Hembury (2nd female at Church Mead).
Well done to Katie van de Linde for running her 25th different parkrun location.
TRC explorers were planning the TRC flags at 2 Welsh parkruns that TRC hadn’t visited before. Well done to Carol and Stuart Page with their visit to Dolgellau and Huw and Tom Moreton for the their visit to Y Promenâd – not only a useful “Y” for their Alphabet but congratulations to them for probably being the 1st to introduce an “â” to the Newsletter!
Furthest travelled goes to Jez Wood on 21st at Strathclyde in Scotland, Andy Collings on 25th at Penrose in Cornwall, Liz Daniel on 28th at Zielony Jar in Kraków, Poland. Liz was celebrating her birthday and gets her ‘Z’ for her alphabet challenge with only a ‘Q’ to get the full set. Our overall winner was Robin Attfield on 4th who was parkrunning at Hermanus, South Africa. Robin is the only member to have run here and has done so 8 times.
January 2015 saw a number of you running your 1st parkruns so happy 10th birthday to Anne Kippax, Trevor Lark, Christina Stevens, Richard Murphy, Mary Ward, Michael Ward, Len van de Linde and Sophie Lee.
A long time ago our quiz was to name the 3 “G’s” that TRC have run at the most, and the results are Gadebridge, (thanks to Mark Tikaram, Pauline Foreman, Judy Ewart and Jez Wood) , Gladstone (previous homes for Nick Stallman and Sally Nash) and Gunnersbury (previous home for Maddi and Stephen Pendrigh). So now we move onto the H’s – you’re looking local, at London, and further east.
Our next TRC trip is on 25th January at Rushmere. This coincides with the 2025 Off-road championships. Further details can be found here https://www.parkrun.org.uk/rushmere/course/
Andy Evans