10 Things I Think About The Glen River Park Run

1. Local Park

I think it is great to have a ParkRun so close to Glanmire. Glanmire has lots of houses but no park or track or anything so the closest ParkRun is in the Glen. You could run to the Glen from Glanmire but it is about 5 miles and involves running up a very long steep hill.

2. Volunteering

I think it is amazing that ParkRun works entirely on a volunteer basis. Volunteers are great, I’m not a very good volunteer but Rhona and Billy are, this time they were timekeepers so I had no reason not to do the Glen ParkRun.

3. Warm Up

I think that the Glen is a great place to go for a run. It is a little short of lap but the surface is one of the few remaining no tarmac or concrete loops in the city. I did two laps of the flat loop to warm up in my New Balance 1080s before changing into my Nike Vaporfly 4s to show that I was intent on making a Barry Twohig or Michael McMahon style effort.

4. Visitors from Glanmire

I think that ParkRun is a very welcoming community. Before the start they have a little chat where they welcome all the people from different places. There were people from all over the place, Croatia, Wales, England and Glanmire.

5. English Tourist

I think that I was horrified to see what my running brain saw as an English tourist with significant running ability powering down the hill just in time for the start. I had hoped to be able to make my attack on Barry Twohig’s impressive course record of 16:30 on my own. Now I knew I would have company.

6. “I’m Only Doing a Tempo”

I think that after the first lap I was considering trotting out the usual excuse when you get a bad beating in a ParkRun that I was only doing a tempo. It was very hard work and it seemed to be completely impossible to drop the English tourist in his sunglasses.

7. Mount Glen

I think that I was very lucky that the Glen ParkRun route goes up a huge steep hill twice. It wasn’t so much the going up the hill that made the difference but the going down. The going down is harder than the going up and having navigated the hill with Billy in a buggy I was very good at running down the hill, good enough to get a little gap on the English tourist.

8. One Lap Left

I think that it is great to have courses with laps. Laps are great for breaking down a race into manageable chunks. With one lap to go I had a tiny gap on the English tourist, it wasn’t really a gap as I suspected that if he was anywhere near me on the finishing straight I would be easily out-sprinted so I knew I needed to make another effort up and down the hill.

9. First Finisher

I think I did very well to stay ahead of the English tourist and become the first finisher. In the end there was only 10 seconds or so between us all of which was found on the downhill. Once I had collected the finishing token I realised that it was in fact not an English tourist but a Glen Park regular Marcus Bishop who happens to be from England but is in the process of becoming from Cork.

10. Faster Than Meade

I think the great thing about ParkRun aside from all the other great things like the volunteering and the niceness is the historical list of fastest times. It was great to find out that my time while 30 seconds slower than Barry Twohig’s ridiculous effort was 20 seconds faster than John Meade which is great and wonderful. An indirect bad beating of John Meade.