February was the second of my 2 months as volunteer co-ordinator. I had done a 2 month stint last year, but I really thought January and February would have been much more difficult than it was.

It still amazes me the amount of good will from the volunteers, many of whom volunteer week in week out.  In February we also had quite a few first time volunteers, which is really nice.

Week one saw a bit of water in the park.

The following week, we saw lots of water.

The last 2 weeks of the month were almost dry, although there was a mad panic as a fallen tree was blocking the path on Friday and the event would have had to be cancelled if we couldn’t get it moved.  Luckily, the council were brilliant and they moved the poor tree and cut branches to make it passable. During another storm on Friday night another tree came down, but luckily only half blocked the path, so the event could go ahead.

Numbers in February have been fantastic, apart from the 3rd week when we have the doubt over the fallen trees and it was half term.  Every other week we had more than 100.  I would love to average over 100 runner each week during 2014.  I think we can do it.

We also had a great really nice visitors this month.  We had a big group come over from Eastbourne parkrun.  They were a really lovely group of people.  Again, of different abilities and very friendly.  We also had a 250 t-shirt in the park, which belonged to Becky Thurtell. She visited with David Piper, who himself had a 100 t-shirt. We were also visited by the Flynn family. 5 of them ran with well over 600 parkruns between them (photos below).

We have now ordered the pacer t-shirts.  We are going to have numbers 24 to 34 minutes on the t-shirts in order to cover the bulk of the runners.  We had planned to start this in February but it just didn’t happen. I’m really looking forward to launching pacer day.  It will really add to the event and I love seeing people have the chance to improve their achievements.

It’s been another amazing month for juniors in Clair Park. One of the reasons for launching parkrun was to help give others the chance to do sport in the way I did when I was a kid. I was amazing lucky.  I had 2 incredible supportive parents who did all they could to support me in my sporting activities and a school that was incredible.  In the last 2 week of the month around a quarter of the runners were juniors.  They run to the start line to get to the front and then rush to get to the first corner first.

We have already handed out quite a few 10 t-shirts (Orson and Lewis have theirs in the photo above) and there are a lot more on 6, 7 or 8 run, who will get to 10 runs in the next month or so.

I’m not going to write about parkrun every week. To be perfectly honest, it’d get a bit dull.

However, if anything out of the ordinary happens, then I will make an exception.

The weather has been appalling for the last few months.  More rain than I can remember falling before.  When we first started to plan parkrun around this time last year, we visited Clair Park and it had been raining heavily.  The section at the bottom of the course was totally flooded.  I imagine that it is down to the drains getting blocked following the leaf fall.

So I guess what greeted us was to be expected.  I had no particular role this week, so I was free to take some photos and I was lucky that it happened this week.

Here are a selection of the photos I took.  There are more at – https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.209565615909160.1073741864.136451203220602&type=3

I did wonder how people would react to this, especially the juniors. It was amazing.  Everyone got stuck in and seemed to relish it.

There seemed to be a real buzz afterwards today, as people had something extra to talk about.

The power of parkrun does not and hopefully will never cease to amaze me.