Today I am In beautiful cathedral city of Chichester, West Sussex that is also their county town and boasts a large number of grade two listed buildings.

Chichester parkrun is located at the city’s Oaklands park that 10 acre site was originally bought by the council in 1939 for the princely sum of £11,000 then after the second world war it was opened up for sporting use including becoming the home of Chichester RFC

Special Milestones

Lynette Woodward -250th parkrun

The main reason why I chose Chichester to visit this week was to help celebrate with my good parkrun friend Lynnette on her reaching the impressive milestone of 250 events today and she was ably supported on the day by Jasper one of her dogs.

Lynnette has also amassed 157 volunteer credits to her name including 65 as run director and was also event director as well.

You are not only a credit to Chichester but the whole parkrun family and you should be rightly applauded by all of us for the volunteering work you have done!

Paul Sinton-Hewitt – 500th parkrun

Big deserved well done to parkrun founder Paul Sinton-Hewitt the man who started parkrun back in 2004 at Bushy Park, London completed his 500th milestone parkrun today!

I was lucky to meet Paul at Raphael parkrun during my charity year of running all the Greater London events.

A true gentleman who concept of parkrun has inspired so many people around the world to don on their running trainers and just enjoy parkrun being with their local community every Saturday morning.

We all salute you sir!

Course

The course is three laps of Oaklands Park that both starts and ends outside Chichester Festival theatre, and it is undulating in elevation and running surface mainly comprises of grass but there is a short section of both tarmac and gravel paths.

The course is criss-cross in design that slowly works you up the highest point of the park by the pavilion, then you run back across the top and down the tarmac footpath to either start a new lap or turn off to finish!

Points to note

• At the start we run a short distance across the field then do a u-turn, that is a little bit of a bottleneck, but to be fair all the runners soon sort themselves out afterwards on the course.
• Overall, I would use normal running trainers even in the wettest of conditions because I know how slippery trail running shoes are on tarmac surfaces especially on this course when you are running down hill
• Love the wooden post parkrun directional markers dotted around the course

Finally, on the course any event that finishes with a welcome downhill section gets top marks in my books!

My time was 33:52 that that is fair a reflection of my parkrun times right now.

Facilities

There is pay and display parking available Northgate car park with a tariff of £1.90 for up to 2 hours that is located adjacent to the park Sat Nav PO19 6AA

There are also free public toilet facilities in at the corner of Northgate car park that were open when I arrived at 8:15 am, that is always welcome news for us parkrun tourists.

For the post run coffee, we retired the Chichester Festival Theatre and it was lovely to sit outside in the late summer sun and chat with the local parkrun patrons 🙂

Conclusion

Big thank you this weeks run director James and his team of volunteers for making us all feel very welcome on the day, top work guys!

For my tourist friends I see Chichester as a mini break holiday destination by not only running their event, but also exploring for example England’s newest National Park in South Downs and book tickets to their theatre of the evening 🙂

Talking out mini break parkrun holiday weekends I am really looking forward to mine next week 🙂

So, until then happy parkrunning everyone,

Best

Mark aka Silent Runner