Eighty-seventh parkrun

With the students back, the parkrun crowd was larger than usual. The start was slightly odd: rather than stand on the grass until the last minute before being waved onto the tarmac path, we stayed clear of the path and ony moved on to it once the whistle had gone. This seems to be a restriction placed on parkrun by the local council, presumably because the more vocal users of the path take advantage of every Saturday to complain about a few hundred runners taking over the pedestrian part of the track for an hour a week.

The run itself was OK and I finished in 20:12. I hadn't seen the others at the start, but I waited around afterwards anyway and sure enough, D came in about 5 minutes later having started at the very back. I asked her if she'd seen A, and she said not; but then a minute or so later, A powered in wearing an unmissably bright fluorescent orange top and we couldn't work out how D had missed her. The mystery was solved when A recovered enough to say that she'd started even further back than D and had spent the entire run chasing her.

I've also realised that, as of today's parkrun, I've only missed one event in the last year. I missed the run back on the 13th of May because I was in Seattle but that's been it. The run on the 9th of September didn't count due to logistical problems and I volunteered way back in December 2016, but I'm counting both of those as participation, even if they don't count towards my official run total...