Parkrun tourism: Wotton parkrun

My husband, sister, brother-in-law, nephew and I recently did some parkrun tourism at Wotton parkrun. Wotton parkrun is based at Wotton Community Parc (that is the correct spelling!) in Wotton-under-Edge in the very south of Gloucestershire. It is one of the last parkruns we still had to do in Gloucestershire.

I must admit I was keen to do it because it is so small. There are usually around 40 to 60 runners. A couple of times this year there had been less than 30! I don’t go chasing the first lady position, but I do check previous weeks’ results to see if it would be a possibility for me. It was a definite possibility at Wotton! It was also very possible my sister could get second lady. Generally the first lady at Wotton is in the range of 24 to 26 minutes, although the week before we went there, she had finished in 22:18.

Parking for Wotton parkrun is at Katherine Lady Berkeley’s (KLB) School. It is then a short walk to the parkrun. There is a portable toilet on site, which wasn’t in the best condition when we visited, but we’re always pleased that there is a toilet when do parkun tourism.

Dogs aren’t allowed at Wotton parkrun, which was fine for us.

The first timers’ and tourists briefing was BIG. There were more tourists than there were regulars. We just hoped there was going to be someone local running fast to follow, as the course sounded complicated. With the exception of a couple of people from Cornwall, most tourists were fairly local – from Bath, Bristol and Gloucestershire.

The course started in the corner of the rugby field and did a lap of the rugby and football pitches, before heading off for the main lap. It is almost entirely on grass, which I can imagine would be very muddy sometimes. We went along after several weeks of dry weather and it was very hard, dry and pretty uneven.

I started out near the front, in first female position and just on my husband’s shoulder. The course is two and a bit laps around the park, taking in different areas of the park. We seemed to get round the first lap pretty quickly. There are a couple of gradual climbs and a couple of gradual downhills. With the hard ground, it was all more challenging than I was expecting it to be.

We’d been told about a gap in the hedge which was quite narrow and to be careful because you would pass runners going in the opposite direction when you went through the gap. It was when I got to the skate park, the furthest part of the course, that I thought I hadn’t been through the gap in the hedge. The skate park has a small section of tarmac to run on, which was pleasant.

Then I went through the gap on the return and realised I had actually been through it previously! It wasn’t as narrow as I’d expected from the briefing. There were cones separating the two sets of runners. In fact, there were cones everywhere marking the course. My husband and I do course set-up of our home parkrun regularly and I didn’t envy the people having to set this one up!

I hadn’t appreciated that the small lap around the rugby and football pitches at the start was also the end of the first lap. But, before I knew it, we were starting the second lap. I briefly overtook my husband (literally the only time I ever beat him usually is on New Year’s Day, because he drinks and I don’t!). Then he overtook me and I overtook him again. Then, at 1.8 miles, a woman overtook me! I hadn’t realised, but apparently she had been right behind me for quite a long time.

Parkrun is a run not a race. But if you want to treat it like a race, that’s OK. As long as you’re not doing it in a way which involves being disrespectful to other people or putting them at any sort of risk. I was absolutely treating it as a race and so was this woman. My husband told me to go for it and he dropped back. I overtook her as we headed down from the skate park for the second time. We were neck and neck as we passed the football pitches for the final time. But she was just too young and too strong for me. (It turns out she was in the 40-44 age category, I’d assumed she was maybe 10 years younger than that, from what I could see of her from behind.) I stayed on her tail and kept pushing right to the finish, but couldn’t beat her.

I finished in 22:06. I was 10th overall out of 68 runners. I’d actually run the second fastest female time anyone had run at Wotton parkrun in 2025. Any other week I would have got first lady with no problems. It was just unfortunate that the woman who ran the fastest time of the year was there on the same day as me. On the plus side, I had the highest age grading of anyone there that day – 76.77% – and had also run more parkruns than anyone there that day. So I will take those wins!

Parkrun tourism is when you run at a parkrun other than your regular (‘home’) parkrun. Some people do it every week. Some people never do it. We mainly do it out of necessity – when we need to be somewhere other than our local park at 9am on a Saturday. But we also like to go somewhere different just for fun every now and then. Some people do challenges with their parkrun tourism. I’ve never bothered with these, but my friend Joy aka Pink Oddy is a fan.

We’re slowly working our way through the Gloucestershire parkruns. I haven’t blogged about all of them, but we’ve now done: Berkeley Green, Cheltenham, Cirencester, Forest of Dean, Gloucester City, Gloucester North, King George V Playing Field (Cheltenham), Lydney, Mallards Pike, Newent, Stonehouse, Stratford Park (Stroud), Tewkesbury, Wotton.