It’s great to be touring again after a few weeks away and this week’s event was held at Stoke Park, Guildford, Surrey.

Stoke Park

Stoke Park is a beautiful 52 hectare Green Flag park that was donated by Lord Onslow in 1925 to the people of Guildford ‘with his express wish for all time remains the lung of the town.” link

Looking down I think Lord Onslow would be rightfully proud of his green lung gift to the town with the local community using every inch of the park on the morning from junior cricket matches to parkrun taking place 🙂

Course

The course consists of two undulating anticlockwise laps of the perimeter of Stoke Park that’s running surface is a mixture of grass fields and tarmac footpath of about equal proportion.

At the start due to the number of runners taking part (391 yesterday) they start line is on the main grass field to allow everyone safe room to overtake, but make sure you run to the right side of the laid-out cones.

On the start of the second lap now that the runners are evenly spread out you run slightly wider on a trial path for a short period of time to make up the distance.

Points to note.

• Majority of the course uphill slopes are thankfully on the tarmac footpath that makes it easier to run up.
• I have been told in the winter the lower parts of the course grass sections can get very muddy.
• Just be weary on the tarmac footpath is divided into two by a painted line, half for walkers/runners and half for bicycles, but to be fair I don’t remember seeing any cyclist while I was running on the course!
• Always a bonus at the end the finish funnel is on a downhill stretch 🙂

Overall I was happy with my run on this course time 35:17

Facilities

Very simple with the rail strike for me the only way to get to Guildford was my car and there is free parking available at the Guildford Spectrum Leisure Centre park-and-ride and it’s free up to 4 hours postcode GU1 1UP.

There was the added bonus of toilets available right next to the parkrun start line that is always welcome to us tourists.

Post run coffee

For the post run coffee I ended up at the lovely Stoke Park Guildford kiosk for a delicious well-earned bacon & egg bap and it was nice to sit down with some local parkrunners and have a nice post run chat about everything parkrun, thanks guys 🙂

The kiosk is situated by a stunning Japanese ornamental garden that simply takes your breath away the first time it comes into view 🙂

Conclusion

I would like to thank this week run director, Caroline and her team of high viz heroes for making us all feel very welcome on the day, great stuff guys!

Great touch I have never seen this before is the run director calls out as a sign of appreciation all the names of this week’s volunteers at the run briefing, so we all can rightly applaud them one and all, love it 🙂

So finally, if you are looking for a challenging, but beautiful course then I can highly recommend Guildford parkrun to you all 🙂

Best

Mark aka Silent Runner