Today at Roding Valley, Loughton on a grey wet horrible Saturday morning for running I found why I love parkrun tourism so much, making new friends and seeing old ones, running so many varied types of park courses, at times I feel like I am the luckiest man alive!

Run at Roding Valley Recreation Ground is a large open space with varied sports in mind to support the local community that has the River Roding meandering around it’s parameter!

Again it was great to bump into old tourist friends in the shape of Kevin Brown, Andrew James that I first met on my Capital parkrun adventure at Valentines parkrun back in February this year! Joining them was their tourist friends Matthew Scrivin and Peter Loose, great to meet you guys!

It was also Kevin’s 200th parkrun event today and very soon he will be running his 100th different parkrun venue, top work sir! For the record Kevin is the pirate sporting the fetching West Ham football top 🙂

Course

The course is two flat clockwise laps of the parameter of Roding Valley Recreation Ground that surface is about a 50-50% mixture of tarmac paths and grass fields!

Points to note

• As noted in the run briefing the wooden bridge crossing the river was very slippery in the wet
• Grass was quite firm today, but I can see it getting quite boggy in places after long periods of rain
• In the right weather conditions a very fast course!

For the record I decided run in trail shoes because of the wet conditions, it was quite an unusual situation as I decided to run the whole parkrun on grass as I did not know before that half of this course is run on tarmac so would have been hard work in trail shoes, time today was 35.41

Facilities

There is a free small car park near the start point of the parkrun at Sat Nav IG10 3BS and toilets are available at the recreation ground changing rooms before the start of the event!

At the moment of writing this there is no post run place to have a coffee, but after speaking to the Event Director Paula says the council are looking to upgrade onsite facilities to include a cafe hopefully in the near future!

Final verdict

I would like to thank the Run Director Frances and her team of volunteers for not just making us all feel extremely welcome but for standing out there in terrible weather cheering us all over the finish line, you all deserve medals!!!!!

So Roding Valley you are a top friendly parkrun community that shone through the most miserable of day’s and have reinforced why I love parkrun so much!

Best

Mark

Event 65 South Oxhey 11-11-2017