When there is a severe weather warning featuring 80kph winds and heavy rain, one would probably be best advised not to travel to Wigan to do a woodland parkrun and watch a third division football match. Sensible people would probably fuck the whole thing off, do some Les Mills in their living room and then watch the match on Sky.
Fortunately, though, I don’t know any sensible people so Rob and I just packed a choice of footwear and some extra layers and boarded the train for the North, arriving at nightfall in the pissing rain. We checked into the luxury of the Wigan Premier Inn (how many Premier Inns have I been to this year?) and then went out to eat the only vegetable pie in Wigan and discuss options. (We don’t get a lot of vegetarians here, said the waitress apologetically).
I couldn’t see any possible way that Wigan’s local parkrun, Haigh Woodland, would be going ahead in the conditions – it seems to have the full gamut of things you don’t want in bad weather like hills, quagmire and flying branches. But all credit to them, they weren’t going to cancel in a hurry. They clung on far longer than several more urban parkruns in the area, sending scouts out to the course (“it’s fine, just a tad wet and breezy” said one hardy northerner, posting a picture of himself looking like a drowned rat with a headtorch as proof) and a volunteer to move trees by hand. In the end, though, they had to concede that there was a great danger of volunteers and participants blowing all the way to Liverpool, and so, off it was.
This was sad news but it was ok because whilst eating the pie we had discovered that the North West has a huge number of lovely sounding parkruns. Preston, we thought, sounded particularly sturdy and not too far away, thus it became Plan B. Unfortunately, Preston soon fell too, due to an accumulation of perilous items in the park. By the time we woke, Warrington looked like a good punt: a B course that was “mostly sheltered from the wind” and “avoided the chance of falling in the lake”.
Warrington cancelled in the thirty seconds between buying a ticket to Warrington and getting on the train to Warrington. We therefore did not board the train to Warrington and hotfooted it in the howling wind and rain to the other Wigan station, where we missed the train to Manchester by about a minute. Now the only place we could reach by public transport was Bolton. Bolton cancelled while we were waiting for a train to Bolton.
Most people would have called it all off and made do with a trip to the thrilling sounding Museum of Wigan Life, but I wasn’t done. There was one last possibility, a taxi to Manchester. Three parkruns, Heaton Park, Sale Water Park and Wythenshawe, hadn’t cancelled (yet) and for the next forty-five minutes I stood under the cover of Wigan Wallgate, listening to the rain coming down, clicking refresh over and over with my frozen fingers. If just one of the three posted that they were on by 0800, we could make it in time.
7:57am. Heaton parkrun: “As it stands we are ON. It will be three laps. The start will be moved slightly”.
I moved faster to procure transport to wherever the hell Heaton parkrun is (somewhere in the north east of Manchester?) than I ever have at any parkrun and by 0840 we were in a car park watching a gaggle of windswept and rain soaked idiots in running gear scuttle towards a cafe to take shelter. I still had a rather uneasy feeling that the whole thing was going to be called off until the very last moment though I couldn’t help but notice that the rain had stopped and the wind had eased off. I’ve run in a lot worse. I’ve run a marathon in a lot worse.
At this stage I was so desperate for my parkrun fix that I wouldn’t have cared if it was twenty-two laps on knee high coriander, but actually Heaton Park is a course that is well suited to my tastes (scenic, hilly, tarmac). The three-lap version was clearly not popular with the locals, the reason being that it is basically three times up a massive hill (“angina hill”) and three times back down again. Apparently the normal course is a bit easier and more varied but also has more potential for unwanted foliage-based missiles. It also seemed that “the start will be moved slightly” meant “the start will be moved about three hundred metres and this will be the longest parkrun you have ever done”. (B courses are supposed to be slightly long to avoid people getting unbeatable PBs but I wouldn’t have thought there was any danger of that with the triple hill delight). It was very kind of the team to give us the free extra distance to make up for any disappointment with the weather. Such kind souls.
It was straight back in a cab to Wigan as soon as we’d scanned tokens and taken the obligatory Sign Photo. You will be glad to know Leyton Orient thumped two goals past Wigan Athletic, thus raising their chances of staying up and giving us another opportunity to come back and launch ourselves at Haigh Woodland next year.
7:07 