Va Va Voom Vogrie parkrun 15/4/17

Remember Crackerjack?

C’mon, you do? It was on Beeb 1 for decades. It used to start with –

“It’s Friday, It’s 5 O’clock, It’s CRACKERJACK!!”

Queue the hormonally enthused audience of pre-adolescents and beyond, cheering and bellowing, fuelled by sugar and the colourants ingested with their tea time snacks.

So

It’s Saturday, It’s 09:30 (other times do apply), It’s PARKRUN!!!

Met this morning with perhaps not the same zeal as a 1970’s 11 year old, but the internal cheer is still there. Today we had a bit of parkrun tourism thing going on, venue number 36 for me I think and 113 in all, but who’s counting?

Where to today?

Vogrie, a must for all those parkrunners who crave to tick of the alphabet of venues. It’s a fairly new addition to the few runs that we have in the Lothians and a welcome and worthy challenge.

Vogrie, (it means boggy place), is a large country park lying to the south of Edinburgh.

As usual all the details are on the official page.

It’s always very useful, when the park has one of these history boards, you wouldn’t know half this stuff otherwise.

I really had no idea what to expect today as I walked towards the start line, it’s only a short walk from the toilets and free (till 11am) parking. Unless you know the area and local public transport well, I would say this is a car essential venue.

You can see Vogrie House in the background, that’s also the venue for the post run cuppa.

Here the masses listen in to the pre-run briefing, they mention that you might meet a horse! That is a definite occasion when you respect the other user of the path.

Not long after this photo we were off…………and not long after that I was feeling like the overindulgent “Crackerjacker” who had gobbled too many snacks. I felt leaden and I was puffing like a steam train and that was before the dip and rise, the first of many.

I gamely pushed on and being a newcomer I asked a runner if it was two laps of what we had just done, ‘Yes’, he said between puffs. His name was Richard. He was however far fitter than me and he continued to chat whilst I puffed in reply. After a kilometre I had to share with Richard that he was obviously in better shape than me and that I was holding him back and that he should go……….and off he went. Great to chat with a like minded soul though, thanks Richard.

On I puffed, over the compacted gravel, tarmac, grass and bare earth trails and paths. Some of these are a bit narrow and on the bare earth parts you need to watch out for the tree roots. This felt to me like a cross country run and this only added to my puff and pant routine. As I say in the video, I wore trail shoes but today you could have worn road flats. In the winter this will be an interesting course.

Onwards, onwards I told myself as I rallied downhill, hoping to store some kinetic potential energy for the inevitable incline to follow and then the final wee bit before running on to the finish.

I was puggled, red faced and sweaty as you can see from my video, made moments after I crossed the line.

I did look at my watch and found that there was an obvious answer for my palpitations and glowing demeanor, I had just run under 25 minutes.

Va Va Voom Vogrie indeed, I’ll take that, thank you very much.

Thanks to the core team and all the volunteers at Vogrie,