These days Leyton Orient are in League One, which means that they no longer have to play teams whose grounds are just big wet fields in the middle of nowhere with a bus shelter at one end. Now we get to go to proper stadiums in the middle of nowhere. They have roofs and flushing toilets and the capacity of the stadium exceeds the attendance record of the local parkrun (oh, but we don’t have attendance records any more, why is that again?)
Personally I was overjoyed to go to Barnsley, a proper place that I could roughly locate on the map without Google. (Near Sheffield somewhere. Not as far as York). But my friend, who shall remain anonymous, wasn’t so impressed.
“Why would you want to go to Barnsley parkrun?” he said. “It’s really hilly and all tarmac. And it’s in a depressing park.”
“But ***,” I said, “that’s exactly what I like in a parkrun. I like hills and I like tarmac. And as both a goth and a Leyton Orient fan, I actively seek depressing things”.
“But it’s in Barnsley!” lamented my friend. “Why would you want to go to Barnsley when there are so many nicer places in Yorkshire?”
“Because that’s where the football is,” I said. “I could ask Orient to call the match off and play Sheffield Wednesday instead but I don’t think they will listen.”
And so it was that I found myself in Barnsley on a damp weekend inFebruary, having dragged several friends with some affiliation to the north to the not-actually-depressing Locke Park with the aforementioned complainer volunteering in protest. Barnsley parkrun is indeed hilly tarmac, three whole laps of it. You start by going up a hill and then along a bit and then up again and then along again and then up again. On several occasions you feel like you must have reached the top but glance up and spot some parkrunners lumbering up a higher level. If you are paying attention to your surroundings you might spot some ornamental pillars (moved from a bank on the high street apparently), a big round tower and an ornamental fountain with some flowers around it. However you may well be too busy dying on your feet to notice any of these things.
When you get to the top, your reward is a smooth and uninterrupted downhill. However, rather like a helter-skelter, it feels you spend an awful lot of time and effort trying to get to the top and are back down at the bottom in seconds. And then of course you have to do it all again. Three times. This is definitely not an easy course, in fact according to an old (2018) website I found it has more elevation than Hadleigh and at that time was the hilliest all-tarmac parkrun in the UK. In keeping with this, I recorded my slowest time and first non-sub-35 of 2024 with 35:38. Yes, I’ve got faster while I’ve not been updating this blog. The two things are not related.
Meanwhile, Leyton Orient managed to show that being in League One hasn’t changed their luck, by managing to turn a 0-1 lead at 85 minutes to a 2-1 defeat at full time. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone to Barnsley after all.
7:07 