Parkrun!

Since January, C and I have been doing some regular running near her house - in the form of a Parkrun. This is a weekly "timed 5km run in a park", and it is completely free. Officially it is you against the clock, but of course there are some 50-60 other runners around you - mainly for pacing purposes ;). If you are like me, it actually becomes quite competitive:

This is especially true if you settle on trying to pass whoever is in front of you just before the finish line ...

Given that there are quite a number of parkruns around, there are rumors that some people travel the country in search of an event that they can win. All the race statistics are published on the web, so it is (supposedly) simple to figure out if there is a course somewhere in the country whose record is slower than one's own personal best time. This weekend, I got to see how this procedure works in practice: Someone was actually trying to run ahead without any apparent knowledge of the course. Normally, this is not really a problem as there will always be knowing runners ahead and there are also arrows marking the way. Unfortunately, the runner in question happened to be first and ended up taking a wrong turn (missing arrow!) and got back on track only by the time I came by. This was well beyond the current leader, making it impossible to catch up. Ah well, try again next time.