Running the Parks of London

Everyone kept telling me running in London is awesome. From my memories of studying abroad in London over 6 year ago, this is in fact true. There’s an abundance of parks to run in. And since my last long-stay in London, I’ve become a long distance runner, so the number of parks have become more important. I usually just stuck to 3-5 mile runs in Regent’s Park back in 2004. Now, things are a bit different. On my 12 mile run last weekend, I made my way through Camden Town, Regent’s Park, down to Oxford Circus, did a loop of Hyde Park, where I saw Kensington Palace, and made my way back to the apt. I had been running in Hampstead Heath previously, so I changed it up a bit for the longer run to see more of London’s parks.

When this trip to London was becoming finalized, I realized I wasn’t going to be running a ½ marathon this month. My sisters and a few lucky NYC’ers ran the NYC ½ last weekend with Kara Goucher. I was amongst the unlucky runners who didn’t get into the lottery (plus 1 million of my runner friends). So our options were the National ½ in DC and a ½ in Wilmington, Delaware. Since I’m about 3,400 miles away, these races weren’t happening for me. But my friends who did run this past weekend did awesome.

Next option, find a race in either England or somewhere in Europe. There were a few options, but going outside of England was going to be too difficult to plan when I had so much work going on. I looked at nearby places in England, but all the good ones sold out. So my options kept decreasing. Luckily I found one within the city of London! So I decided to run the Waltham Forest Borough ½ in North London. The post code is E4, so it seems close, but in fact it wasn’t (it was practically in Scotland). I think whomever came up with the post codes mixed it up with E14, which is in Central London.

You can see a theme with a few recent posts. Yup, travel issues. And man did that come to fruition on Sunday. The night before was British Summer Time, so we skipped ahead an hour. I lost an hour of sleep. Yay. I attempted to register online for this race a couple of weeks ago, but it wouldn’t let me. My plan was to arrive to the race start by 8am to give plenty of time to register before the 9am start. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Lovely http://www.tfl.gov.uk/ totally was wrong in their “Trip Planner” option. I missed the first bus by mere seconds. I had to wait another 15 minutes. The transfer bus apparently doesn’t exist. Great. After wondering around trying to find it, I finally got on a bus that was going in the direction I wanted. I had been looking out for cabs, but in North London they are sparse, especially early on a Sunday morning. At the next stop there were some cabs! I had to negotiate a £10 cab ride to the start. Luckily he took me.

I arrived at the start right as the race was beginning. I had to hurry up and register, strip down to my running clothes, and drop off my bag. I started about 5 minutes after the start. Normally this isn’t a huge issue when there are thousands of runners, but there were about 200 people running this race. I played catch up for a few miles. Of course I’m running on adrenaline and eventually had to slow down. AND all these hills kept coming out of nowhere. This “London is flat” mantra is not true from my perspective.

Considering I only had about 4 long runs, ranging from 6-12 miles over the last couple of months, I’m glad I finished with a half-way decent time. I of course stalked the website all day yesterday to get my official results and yup, I’m not on the list. Somehow my chip didn’t register or I wasn’t included due to my tardiness. No worries, I reach out to them and hopefully they will add me. I mean, I did fork over £30 for this race.

Now if I was on the list, it would have gone like this: My official time was 1:52:38 and I placed 89 out of 234. Not too shabby. I got a cool yellow comfy tee, my medal and a Cadbury egg. Yeah, getting ready for Easter! I then made my way back to Camden, where I had lunch with my cousin to celebrate. Hopefully the next international ½ goes smoother…