Today (Saturday May 19th) was a really busy day. It started with a fantastic park run in Burgess Park down in Camberwell, South London, and finished with an elite 10000m European cup race (naturally i wasn’t running that one!).
Yet again it was a truly beautiful day in London, and as I approached Burgess Park along the Walworth Road I felt a strong sense of appreciation for the amazing city that i was born and have spent my whole life in. I was just thinking about which park run would be closest to where i was born, Queen Charlottes Hospital in Hammersmith, which is now the Queen Charlottes and Chelsea Hospital, still a maternity hospital but is no longer on the Goldhawk Road. I reckon its Wormwood Scrubs.
Burgess Park, in Camberwell, is in the London Borough of Southwark
I parked in a rather pretty square just close to the start line
Made my way to the start line, which was jam packed with runners! More than for the previous park runs, i’m sure. Difficult to see in this picture unless you zoom right in!
Interestingly there were a group from an organisation called GoodGym, which combines exercise with helping communities. So they will run somewhere, do something really good, and then run home! What a fantastic idea and well worth looking into. They were acting as pacers, so had numbers on their backs which corresponded to which time they were planning to run the 5k in.
And off we went! The course is to all intents and purposes one lap of the park. It was nice not having to do two laps as in some of the previous park runs (or 3 in the case of Highbury Fields!), which always for me feels like i’m running further than i actually am!
So, following the run I went straight to the Parliament Hill Athletics Track in Hampstead Heath, close to where i live and work, to set up the Backs & Beyond treatment tent for the Night of the 10000m PBs.
If you’ve never been to this event then I would strongly urge you to attend next year. It is a series of 10km races on the athletics track that start in the afternoon and get faster and faster, culminating in two floodlit elite races that this year were part of the European Cup. So there were lots of runners from all around europe competing this year.
We have been involved with the event since its inception in 2013, when my good friend Ben Pochee took the Highgate Harriers yearly 10k race and turned it into what it is today, an elite event that formed part of the qualification trials for the RIO olympics in 2016. Everyone is a volunteer in this event, and our role is to massage and treat the athletes of all the races. I am proud to be involved with this amazing event, and also very grateful that my team readily give up their precious weekend to come and volunteer to treat the athletes.
Here is Holly, one of Backs & Beyond’s osteopaths, treating one of the athletes from this year’s races.
Next week is Brockwell Park!
Gavin's Blog 