Fell Foot Park Night Run

Late afternoon on Saturday we headed over to the National Trust's Fell Foot Park to take part in their first ever night run. It had been an especially wet day and poor Andy and Sam got a soaking at parkrun (William nabbed an undercover volunteer position so we stayed dry!). Luckily by the time we arrived at Fell Foot the rain had stopped but there were still plenty of mud and puddles!

We met up with a friend and her son, registered and waited by the cafe for the other runners and for it to get dark as well! Sam was enjoying throwing leaves and stones into Lake Windermere and William was enjoying running about. Slowly over the next hour the light faded and we started getting our head torches on, pinning numbers and snapping our glow sticks! We also joined together 2 sets of Aldi running lights and strapped them round the boys' middles so we could see them better in the dark.

I liked this photo, which was posted into the Fell Foot Night Run event page on Facebook. You can just see Andy holding Sam upside down and then William in the centre with his running lights! 

There were two runs on that evening, the 7k Adventurer and the 3k Explorer. Due to their age the boys weren't allowed to do the longer run and obviously would need supervision so we all ran the Explorer run. Andy ran with Sam and I ran with William. After the pre-run briefing the Adventurer group set off and then shortly after we set off too!

We soon found out just how wet the ground was as we splashed through some very big puddles. I had to laugh when I heard William (age 6) say 'this is my worst nightmare' as he isn't fond of mud or getting his feet wet but he soon got over it and was running really well. Sam did an amazing job. He'd already had a brilliant parkrun in the morning (and was only 20 seconds off a PB) and he kept up a really good pace for this as well, averaging 7.30 minutes/km. He loves nothing better than running through mud and water so managed to get well ahead of William.

It was all over in less than half an hour. Sam came in 25th out of 38 and finished in 24.22 and William came in 31st finishing in 25.45. We all received a glow in the dark National Trust medal and a re-usable goody bag with a wrist band and water bottle.

It was well worth coming out on a damp night in November, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and would definitely do this again next year.