Introduction

We spent most of this week recovering from the John Buckley Sport Cork City 10 Miler. I didn’t train for four days. For me that’s an eternity. Yes I am that guy parkrunning on holiday. As cycles go Brickfields parkrun has been one of the easiest parkruns to get too from where we live in Rathmines. We were on a cycle lane 90% of the way across flatlands. We flew it.

Course

The course is 4 laps and overall flat. Starting you’ll run to the North side of the park, turn left under the trees which provided great shade the day we arrived in August 2022. The northside trees take you along behind the soccer pitches and you’ll follow the arrows past the playground and around to the South side of the park by murials and back to the start. You loop around 4 times. Don’t forget to touch the lap signs on each lap. Nobody maybe counting but you but you’ll be distracted by the park and you might forget which lap you’re on. At the fourth lap turn right and bolt down the sprint corridor. The soccer pitches were a a buzz of activity and the playground was already hopping when we were there. My advice is live a little forget the laps and soak in the joy of the park.

Volunteers

The sprint corridor was made all the more thrilling by the cowbell and volunteers motivating our final sprint. Like most parkruns we chatted about the drop in volunteers. At the time of writing no has cracked this drop in volunteers but the pandemic has left us all with less friends to have some craic with at parkrun. I hope everyone is doing ok? I’ve tried to convince as many as I can to rejoin. It hasn’t worked mostly I’ll keep at it. Maybe consistency will bring them back.

To our horror we later noticed a Facebook message that our results would be delayed. I felt for the volunteers apologising after being awesome and delivering a run. I offered to help results processing having messed it up the previous week in Tramore Valley and then fixed it twice I might have been able to help. It turns out it was beyond all of our powers. We got our results Monday morning. I’d forgotten a glitch had happened. I’ll never forget the cowbell.

Conclusion

Bring your brilliance to Brickfields. The park will bring the beauty. The volunteers will bring the banter.