Another sunny week but much colder than last week. 43 ran this week with 22 at Wendover Woods and 4 at Dunstable Downs and Gadebridge.
Liz Daniel was easily our furthest travelled this week with her trip to Jubilee Way, Adelaide, Australia.
Well done to Gill Gordon who knocked over a minute off her course PB at Wendover Woods with a 35:13. Huw Moreton also improved his Wendover Woods PB with a 20 second improvement to 21:55. Meanwhile Kirsty Dance knocked a minute off her course PB at Gadebridge with a time of 34:28. Kirsty is clearly on fire at the moment as that is 2 weeks in a row she has set personal course PBs at 2 different parkruns.
However, the biggest PB of the day was happening at flat fast Rickmansworth. A 1:26 minute improvement to a time of 17:42 by Becky Raftery is a new female fastest record at the club. A big well-done Becky! That’s also a 17-place improvement from 27th to 10th fastest of all members! Oh, and she was also 1st female and 3rd overall at Rickmansworth.
Looking at where we all have our all-time PBs, the most popular are Aylesbury 36, Rickmansworth 14 and Cassiobury 10. Interestingly for the fastest 10 TRC parkrunners 5 now have their fastest time at Rickmansworth, 2 at Cassiobury and 1 at Aylesbury.
Becky’s age-grade of 86.4% was pretty impressive as well and in many weeks would be the highest for this write-up but only 2nd this week as Lynda Hembury notched up a splendid age grade of 89.98% despite running at a hilly Wendover Woods! Lynda was also 3rd female at Wendover whilst Emma Adcock was also 3rd female at Watermeadows.
Congrats to Brian Richards who saw his best ever token, with number 127 beating his previous best of 138.
Want an extra challenge? – see if you can we can collect as many different numbered finish tokens as possible in 2025. We have seen many of the low ones already – so the 3 lowest of those we are missing are 67, 77 and 91 – can you time your run to collect one of these?
Did you have a go at guessing our favourite parkruns beginning with “N”? – Well the answers were Northala Fields and Netley Abbey (thanks to Maddi and Stephen Pendrigh for those two) and Noble on the Isle of Man courtesy of Judy Ewart.
So we move on to the letter “O”. Can you guess the 3? One is to our West, one in the London direction and then we have a local newcomer. Answers next week.
Just a reminder that our April parkrun outing will be to Church Mead in Amersham on 19th April. More course details at https://www.parkrun.org.uk/churchmead/course/ .
Andy Evans