Parkrun tourism: King George V Playing Field parkrun

King George V Playing Field is a parkrun in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, which is local to me. I unexpectedly did some parkrun tourism there recently. I saw they were calling for volunteers on Facebook. They were looking for barcode scanners and said people could run before scanning, which is something I’ve done at my home parkrun. So, without really thinking about it, I volunteered! This was my first time doing tourism volunteering.

King George V parkrun (locally known as KGV – V not 5) is a three lap grass course on a playing field in the west of Cheltenham. It’s not a scenic parkrun. If you’re looking for scenic, you might prefer Cheltenham parkrun. But Cheltenham regularly has 600 or 700 runners, whereas KGV usually has just over 100. So if you’re in the area and you’re looking for a quiet and welcoming parkrun, it is worth a visit.

Parking is a short walk away at a large public car park at Coronation Square. It is pay and display using either cash or card and, at the time of writing, cost just 30p for an hour and 50p for two hours. Toilets are inside the Saracens rugby clubhouse on the site. They’re not the nicest toilets and there is only one cubicle for ladies, so there was a queue even with a small number of runners.

Unusually for me, considering I normally have another seven members of my family at parkrun with me, I went to King George V Playing Field parkrun on my own. I knew there would be a few people from our running club there, so I wasn’t lonely. I did find it to be a very friendly parkrun.

I’ve run it once before – in 2019 – and couldn’t remember much, so I went to the first timers’ briefing. There were lots of tourists there, including a big group from Vegan Runners. The course is essentially laps of a series of football pitches. It goes around the pitches and we were told specifically not to run on them, so as not to damage them/ wear the white lines out. The course was well marked with arrows and cones, with marshals on all the turns.

I went along to KGV at the end of the sunniest, driest spring on record, so it was very dry. There are a couple of short stretches on gravel paths, but it is pretty much all on grass. I know when I ran it before, it was muddy and pretty treacherous on the bends. Trail shoes would definitely be useful in winter or after prolonged periods of rain.

The run starts with a lap of the rugby pitch at the top of the playing fields. I hadn’t appreciated until I’d run the first lap that we don’t run round this again, so the second lap is slightly shorter. Once all the runners have run round the rugby pitch, the volunteers assemble the finish funnel.

The course is a gradual downhill, then along the bottom football pitch and round it. Because football pitches are supposed to be flat, but the natural lie of the land is on a slope, it is almost like a series of steps. Each football pitch is flat, but then there is a short, sharp slope up to the next pitch. There are two of these on each lap. They would be very slippy if it was muddy.

You then run another lap and another one… On the final lap, you cut diagonally across the rugby field at the top to cross the finish line.

It was a warm day and I wasn’t as quick as I’d expected to be. I was third lady, but my time would have got me first lady on a quieter day – and I would probably have also run a bit faster on a cooler day!

Then it was straight to barcode scanning… Everyone was out of breath and dripping with sweat when they finished. There was a good system for putting finish tokens in numbered pots, so they are easier to sort out at the end. The last walker finished in 57:38, which is slightly quicker than I’m used to at a bigger parkrun. There were 168 runners/ walkers, which they said was a record attendance, with the exception of New Year’s Day.

We’d been told there were delicious cakes in the clubhouse afterwards. This is something KGV is renowned for, but my two hours’ parking was nearly up. I’ll have to try them next time.

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 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.