We travelled to Gatton & did a new parkrun. | Day 2 of HPUM
Gatton. It's a small, regional town about 1 hour 15 minutes drive from Brisbane City Centre. It's west of the city and more than two-thirds of the way to Toowoomba, the nearest actual city.
It's pretty. There's an old-fashion main street and a train station nearby. There's an awesome caf茅 in town called jak and Mo Taste Co. Yes, that's their preferred spelling and capitalisation. Don't ask me why they did it that way, all I can do is tell you that the coffee was awesome and their food menu looked so good I told Brad I wanted to come back to do Gatton parkrun again specifically so I had an excuse to go to this caf茅!
So parkrun. If you're not up to speed on parkrun, it too is spelt strangely. Yes, it's all lowercase and yes, it's all one word.
Now that we have that out of the way, parkrun is a free, weekly, timed, community event that runs every single Saturday (bar pandemics, floods, wars, etc). There are over 400 locations in Australia, in all States and Territories, and more than 2,000 locations around the world, with events being held in something like 20 countries.
Brad, my partner, and I met at a parkrun. So it's kind of special to us and (I'm about to contradict myself here) we are both kind of getting somewhat over it. And by we I probably mean mostly me, as I talked about in this post a few days back. But since Brad loves running a lot and collecting things a lot and routine a lot so he'll probably keep going to a parkrun every Saturday for years and years to come if nothing dramatic changes. Even though he's already run at 337 parkrun events since he started back in 2014.
One of the things we both still enjoy collecting are new parkruns, i.e. parkrun locations we've never been to before. Mostly because we both love travelling and exploring and parkrun gives us a (valid?) excuse to go to places we'd otherwise overlook. Like... Gatton 馃槈
I can tell you that of the 123 parkrun locations I've visited since I began my parkrun journey a few years ago this is one I would happily return to. It has plenty of (free) parking, plus toilets and a water fountain near the briefing area, and the course does laps around a lovely lake. The locals tell me it was dry for 2 years but that in the last month with the inordinate amount of rain we've been getting in South East Queensland (& Northern NSW) that the lake (named Lake Apex) it is so full that the water actually covered a small section of the path!
The ducks were having a field day with all that water to play in. There were so many kinds of water birds it was astounding. In fact, as Brad spent 10 minutes warming up before our 7 am start time, I mostly just stood at stared at one bird after another, after another. It was awesome to take it all in, silently and gratefully.
And while Brad managed his fastest time so far this year I was happy that I stuck to my plan and took it really easy. I've been struggling with a calf issue for months and I'm re-working my running style while rehab'ing my feet and legs. So my rule for myself is that if I'm going to run at parkrun (usually the only day this runner actually runs at present) then I have to run low heart rate and focus on landing with my feet underneath my torso so that I have the greatest chance of experiencing no calf pain (and therefore, hopefully, allowing it to heal).
Now we're home and catching up on housework and Hive-related things, and since Brad seems keen to do another run together tomorrow with a local run club, I'm taking that as my cue to have an afternoon nap! 馃榿
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Hope you're all having a fabulous weekend (or that you do when it finally rolls around to your part of the world 馃槂