19/02/2026
Please find the amazing run report from last week’s park-run (14th February) courtesy of Andrew Airey
Swampstead Flats!
A group of 60 of us left Bristol at 5:30 am this morning on a coach and a minibus, and 20 ran here and the others visited the mass love-in at Valentines.
After a wee and a tea break at South Mimms services, we all got to the start lines on time, even our coach driver.
Once Minaxi had done the first-timers briefing (8 first-ever parkrunners) and Paul, our RD for the day, welcomed us and explained what we needed to know, 223 of us set off for event 716. With today's event, Wanstead has just tipped over the 16,000 finishers mark.
First over the line was Aiden O'Driscoll only 9 seconds off his PB, second was Freddie Abrahams on his 21st run here and third was Alex McNulty who has done over half of his 81 runs at Wanstead. You know it is a tough course conditions when only 2 runners finish in under 20 mins.
First Female was experienced parkrunner Kasia Stachowiak who has over 250 finishes here. Second was first-time visitor Lindsey Kitching and third was Leona Sinclair who has ran all 15 of her parkruns in East London's best event!
Aiden an Freddie nabbed the highest age grades of the day with Mark Drake taking third spot with 69.15% on Valentine's Day!
The most runniest runners were all 500 shirt owners and they are Scott McMillan 628 runs, Paul Kaufman 554 and Alan Branch on 516. I sneaked in to 4th with 478 runs at 411 different locations.
Well done to Adrian Tooth for earning your 250 shirt and I hope it is on order already. You can order your milestone shirts ahead of completion by simply using someone else's ID number, it's so much nicer to have it on the day!
James Thomas bagged his 50th run whilst visiting from Wales, and Matthew Hinchcliffe claimed his purple 25 shirt and 24 of his runs have been here.
The course was a challenge with some large slippery areas of mud which felt tougher on the second lap. Just over ¼ of the finishers were first timers here (57) and 10 PBs were had.
21 volunteers ensured that this event went ahead today. There are so many roles you can do and still get a credit from Course Check, Event Set up & close down, Tail Walker, Park Walker (there was a very attractive one here today 🙂), First Timers welcome, Token Sorting, VI Guide, Barcode Scanning for the quicker runners and even writing the weekly report on the sofa with a cuppa and a packet of biscuits.
Our group headed to Spoons for breakfast before picking up the rest of our tourists from Valentines at 11:45 am. Some of them never managed to get breakfast in the local Spoons due to how busy it was!
We arrived back in Bristol, tired and muddy, just after 3:30 pm with our results in the bag and another successful Airey Airways trip.
