plan every race in advance, but a setup that lets you turn up on the day anywhere in the country, enter for free and get timings on the website the same day is much easier. In this
case it gave me the chance to just turn up & enter a race at the end of a holiday rather than have yet another lie in. And as I’m originally from that area & went to school half a mile from the park, the idea of running a race while ‘back home’ was a bonus.
The setup is pretty much the same as at Hanley park or probably any other park run. Turn up, join the crowd, wave when they ask if anyone is ‘visiting’ from another park run, listen to the briefing including the obligatory ‘don’t knock pedestrians over, even the awkward guy who deliberately stands in the middle of the course’, and you’re off. The course runs over three laps around the outside of the well-kept park, mainly through residential areas but with one corner running beside the Goldstone centre (once home of the mighty Brighton & Hove Albion but now a shopping estate). Hove park isn’t flat, but the hills are nothing like the long drag to the top of Hanley so I could keep up a decent pace.
My Garmin had died the previous week so I was running without a watch, but they had marshals on each kilometre mark shouting our times as we ran past. Of course that meant that I knew I was running at a reasonable pace so had to keep putting the effort in to maintain it! There were over 200 runners on the day, ranging from fast club runners to young children & their parents, so by the last lap the field was completely spread out & we were all in single file or small groups. The last half km coming downhill towards the finish line (that’s better than at Hanley!) got quite interesting as the faster runners started putting in sprint finishes & trying to beat each other to the line, while dodging around slower runners who we were lapping. In the end I was completely outsprinted in the home straight, but finished in 19:41 and I was very happy to have beaten the 20 minute mark. A good race, I’ll probably do it again, and I’ll definitely look for another Park run next time I’m away.
For more information visit the Brighton & Hove Parkrun website.
Martin C.