Clonakilty parkrun
In January of 2020 Julie and I resolved to visit all the parkruns in Cork over the year. We had a lot of different motivations for this challenge it was New Year and a new physical activity challenge was an obvious must (In 2017 Julie came home one day from work and told me we’re doing the entire Dublin Race Series including the Marathon so we know how to jump in whole hog), we loved sporadically visiting other parkruns on weekends away and holidays, we love finding a nice café for breakfast after the run, it was a good way to see our home county and because people in Glen River maybe reading yes spying on other parkruns.
Suddenly in March of 2020 COVID-19 intervened and parkrun didn’t resume in Ireland until September 2021. In spite of this the team picked up Glen River parkrun up dusted it off got it going again and once a month Julie and I started ticking off the parkruns in Cork again. In a nutshell we took Phil Knight literally.
“Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where ‘there’ is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.” Phil Knight
Alright it wasn’t that simple!!! Did we miss it in between? Yes it was like we were missing an arm. The constant false dawns of this pandemic is over and now we can resume our lives was soul-destroying. For me it’s never the complex things that get me down it’s the simple things that go arseways. We were without a bolt of positivity Saturday morning and it was a really noticeable vacuum. Restarting a parkrun in COVID-19 times was a mammoth task. The compliance with public health guidelines which you would think might be intuitive by now was anything but. Interpretation was shifting to the individual, then the individual who goes to parkrun, back again and then HQ, Tony Holohan and the governement might intervene and you need to rethink things and we haven’t even got to the app yet. The week leading up to the restart was the most nervous I’d been since proposing to Julie earlier in the year.
Let’s get to the point says you what is Clonakility parkrun like? Below is my strava output from the run. Feel free to deliver Kudos. According to Stravas year in sport 2021 I’m terrible at giving back kudos but I’m hoping that reenforcing the guilt will work.
Clonakilty parkrun
Clonakilty parkrun is beautiful. You start in the middle of the showgrounds and you run, jog or walk around the outskirts of the grounds. The morning we visited it was water logged and mucky. Omicron hadn’t stopped this small crew of parkrun volunteers putting on the run and therefore the weather most definitely would not. This slowed us down on the run but we didn’t care if anything it turned the run in a mini cross country adventure.
For 4 laps I slugged it out on this course eventually finishing in second in an abysmal time of 23:12. Thank god I beat the ten-year-old in the sprint finish. To put this in context in 2019 at Glen River an 11 year old thundered past me in the last 5 meters. I never saw him coming. The Glen River crew have never let me forget it since. The young man in Clonakilty showed outstanding stamina throughout the course and if he sees this blog he should keep up his hard work in training. One other thing that caught my eye was the lady with buggy and two children in it. As you may know me and Julie are set to be married in April 2022 and we are hoping to have a family someday so I am naturally observing how one pilots these buggies around parkruns. I mentioned waterlogged and muddy earlier and now I need to be even more clear this course was like running through sludge in parts. This lady didn’t just finish a parkrun, she finished with a buggy whilst driving it through sludge and made it look easy. If Clonakilty decide to go into a buggy pilot at parkrun youtube channel based on today it will be phenomenally popular. Men of my generation will come from miles around to learn this set of skills.
The course itself is great fun you start running towards the boiler room then pan anti-clockwise looping up a short hill all the way to the top of the grounds, past the barn, then down to the anti-chamber and around to the start. The hill is cleverly named “Where legs go to die” on Strava. This is my only bone of contention with Clonakilty I felt it wasn’t that bad but I hasten to add I’m running up a minor mountain in Glen River three weekends out of the four in a month so maybe I’m biased.
We got together with the other participants just inside the main gate by the boiler room. Clonakilty parkrun is small with an average of 36 .7 participants each week. The participants all know each other. One of them seeing the RD needed a hand immediately dashed back to her car to get her phone and help out with timekeeping. I’d like to take this point to encourage visitors to volunteer with Clonakilty here. Later the RD like most parkrun teams told me and Julie that they were having trouble getting volunteers. I think this is pandemic related because prior to Christmas at Glen River parkrun we had no such problems but now we do however our volunteer team is large. From the first day we kicked off in 2018 Julie and I drove at it like a tank crossing the battle field making this team large and diverse. Julie was absolutely determined that this parkrun will not fail and it will not depend one it will depend on all. As a result Glen River is resilient with a large pool of volunteers to draw on. We’re relentless in the Glen. I am known to almost immediately begin the process of promoting a new volunteer to Run Director. Persuasion is the elixir here and once you get someone believing in their potential to lead wearing the blue jacket ‘fits’. The VCs at Glen River have their own squad a team within a team they have crafted templated emails, they have Facebook and Instagram posts that get seen by thousands, they reach out to the community in every conceivable way posters, phone calls, a whatsapp group and chats. We’re a bit bigger and targetted like a laser. Clonakilty is a closer smaller community with small pool of volunteers so the pandemic is hurting a bit more. I wanted to do more but all I could say to the leader in Clonakilty was keep at it this challenge will pass, today for me and Julie was brilliant. Thank you!
