Brockwell park has to be one of my favourite parks in London. It’s in a beautiful area and has lovely views over the city that are refreshingly different for someone who comes from north London!
Brockwell Park is a 125 acre park very close to Herne Hill railway station in the London Borough of Lambeth.
The park has a Grade 2 listed Lido (very similar to the one in Hampstead Heath) and has a grrrrrrrrrreat Cafe which does delicious brunches!
As with every single park run so far, the volunteers were so friendly and the runners chatty and easy going. But BOY was it a hilly run! Maybe it was the way i was feeling today (i’ll tell you about my hip woes later), but it felt hillier than Ally Pally (which really is the mother of all hilly parks!)
It was probably also made a bit harder by it being essentially two loops of the park, where last week in Burgess Park was one lovely loop………… aah nostalgia….. why do i like one loop more than two?
but hey, I made it round, and enjoyed the orderly system they used for putting chips back in the right place to make sorting them easier afterwards (only because its so out of my normal interest of allowing the 2nd law of thermodynamics to rule my life (“the law of entropy” which dictates that everything naturally tends towards chaos in the end)
a couple of the very helpful volunteers that keep parkruns going……..
Of course, what you can’t see is the pain that i am in with my left hip. I used to get a lot of pain at the front of my hip, sort of in the groin, as i got very tired during long runs. It seems to have come back, but has never really bothered me over the 5k distance before. It is, of course, because i havent run properly for 5 years and have lost muscle mass and power. The reason it is on the left side is because when i was 16 i had a skateboarding accident during which i blew a couple of discs.
I only found this out maybe 8-10 years ago when i had an MRI on my back which showed large left sided disc herniations at L4 and L5 which were compressing the nerve roots as they exited at those levels. The nerves affected were mainly the ones controlling the glutes, so for the last 36 years i have had neurologically weakened glutes, so no matter how much i try to strengthen them they will never be as strong as the right hand side. Having said that, they are now considerably weaker than they could be! So i need to start strengthening them.
I’ll post my strengthening exercises in my next blog.
Following the Brockwell park parkrun I went to the Bike Shed exhibition which was being held this year in Tobacco Dock. It was FAB. So many amazing machines, and also some amazing and almost but not quite affordable clothes. Here i am eyeing up a Ducati with Nick and Jamie.
…….. possibly my favourite bike of all time…….
must remember to go this time next year………
Next park run is Gladstone park!
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