27/07/2026
Please accept our apologies for the delay! Below is the run report from Jamie from earlier this month 🥰
Poole parkrun #710 – Saturday 18 July 2026
Four summers ago I ran my first Dorset parkrun at St Mary's in Bridport, twenty minutes from home and at the time my NENDY, the nearest event I had not yet done, with my late mother there at the finish to see me round. This Saturday, in Poole Park, I ran my last. Ten events, spread from one end of the county to the other, and I have now had the great pleasure of all of them. It felt fitting to close the set at Poole, having lately been back where it all began to start St Mary's 300th event in my new capacity as Bridport's town crier, a role that has done nothing for my running but wonders for what my mother would affectionately term my “booming voice”.
Asked for a favourite, I decline on principle, because each of the ten sets its own examination and pays out in its own currency: the drama of Durlston Country Park's hills, the sandy stretches and glorious swimming at Highcliffe Beach, the two-course offer at Weymouth, the unexpected treachery of Bournemouth, and so on around the county. What I will say is that Poole is graciously fast, a flat, generous circuit of park and lakeside that invites you to get on with it. On a blazing hot morning like this one, however, it was perhaps not quite the racetrack it becomes in kinder months, and certainly not the one on which, many years ago at the Poole AC Christmas 10k, I first broke the 40 minute barrier and briefly believed myself an athlete. I still hope to break my parkrun PB of 19’05 one day though, and this course has been earmarked for the attempt.
The crowd was enormous and enormously welcoming: 882 finishers, marshalled without fuss, with a smattering of tourists from as far away as Hungary. Among the travellers were the Opies, and Carolyn's distinctive red Boomeranger shirt stopped me mid-warm-up, because I knew it as one of the tribe: I took B17 from Ganger Farm all the way to Zielony Jar in Kraków, and earlier this year became a golden boomeranger at South Beach Recreation Reserve in Western Australia, the project's spiritual home. We fell to talking of JB9, the boomerang they carried as part of its long arc from their home run at Rickmansworth to Norwich, where on it went and finally home to South Beach earlier this year. I hope to see Carolyn among boomeranger friends at the reunion at Ally Pally parkrun in late August. It is a small world and it folds back on itself in the most satisfying ways.
Proceedings were given a light frisson of danger by two hazards the risk assessment can scarcely have foreseen: a rogue Croc, the shoe rather than the reptile, adrift on the water, and the appearance on the course of what I am confident is the world's smallest sinkhole. Both were navigated by all 882 of us without loss. As for your correspondent: I went out well, faded in a manner that is becoming wearily familiar, and came home in 20:45 for 76th, a performance for which I intend to blame the sunshine, the good times, the frankly curious decision to wear trail shoes on the fastest course in Dorset, and of course, the boogie.
The sharp end was rather better organised. Alan Davies led the field home in a superb 16:27, with Katie Gunn doing nominative determinism a good turn and firing herself home in 19:07 for first woman. The age-graders, as ever, put the rest of us in perspective. Duncan Cooper's 17:53 was worth 91.24 percent in the VM60-64 bracket, and Helen Mellor, running in the VW85-89 category, posted 97.20 percent for her 34:31, which is not so much an age grade as a standing rebuke to everyone who has ever blamed a stiff knee.
It was a morning for celebrations, and the counters clicked round in fine company. Sarah, one of the event’s Run Directors, marked her 50th birthday in the best way available, while Daniel Dobson, Marco Galanti, Mark Mortell and Lucy Dobson all completed their 100th parkrun, Michael Parrott brought up his 250th while visiting Poole for the very first time, Adam Nippard, Nick Lewis and Phoebe Mortell reached 50, and B Rose ticked off 25. Somewhere in the throng, quite reasonably unbothered by any of this, were first-timers and five-hundred-somethings alike, including David Heath on 716 parkruns, who had also been out with the setup crew before most of us had found our car keys.
None of it stands up without the 51 volunteers who gave the morning away for free: Lesley Moore, Lorena Da Silva, Phil Merrell, Eve Filmer, Graham Filmer, Maxine Flubacher, David Heath, Andrew Jenkins, Simon Powell, Julian Barnes, Clive Hardy, Katie Stacey, Peter Whybrow, Penny Estall, Tom Davidson, Andy Robson, Liz Robson, Lottie Homan, Annemarie Popham Lithgow, Nichola Saxon, Nathan Williams, Thomas Harris, George Linney, Deetya Naykar, Freya Payne, Dawn Sycamore, Ewan Telford, Kate Tunks, Sadie Underwood, Julie Boshell, Mike Clemson, Patrick Dominey, Suzie Foord, Grace Galton, Sarah Kenway, Lisa Linney, Lucy Mears, Dean Miller, Jessica Miller, Dan Short, Colin Brooks, Maggie McGrory, Andrea Hann, Peter Hann, Lucy Payne, Sarah Durley-White, Scott Farrell, Angie Penzer, Mel Carroll, your correspondent, and one helper recorded for posterity only as Unknown Athlete, whose service was real even if their barcode was shy.
And so the Dor-Set is done. Ten venues, four years, one county, and not a dull morning among them. I have lived in Dorset off and on all my life, so this was less exploration than making up for lost time, a round of overdue introductions to corners of home I had somehow never properly met. The tour started twenty minutes from my door and finished an hour away, and I come back knowing my county rather better than when I started.
