An Sean Madraí

For those readers that don't know about Parkrun here is a little background. Back in 2004 a runner who was nursing an injury decided to give a little back to his community by organising a timed run in his local park. He with 12 friends ran the very first Parkrun. Since then it has grown just a little. The current numbers for the total number of people who have completed a Parkrun are 1,354,849. Collectively we have covered over 64 million kilometers. Not bad for a free event. That picture on the left was taken on January 9th at Marlay Park Parkrun where I, pictured left, and my daughter on the right got to meet the man behind Parkrun Paul Sinton-Hewitt. It is a measure of Paul that when being interviewed later on RTE radio he was introduced as being effectively Parkrun. Paul immediately corrected the interviewer saying he wasn't Parkrun. The thousands of volunteers and participants are Parkrun. Parkrun Ambassadors from many Parkruns at Marlay with Paul Operation...

This is a long old tale and I am sharing with you mainly to get it all down so I can read it myself in years to come because it was without doubt an epic weekend. It all started about 4 months ago when my good friend Eugene McLacken pinged me an email asking if I was up to see the group Television play a gig in Glasgow. Go look up Television on Youtube. I remembered them completely wrong and had visions of an ultra punk group so I immediately said yes. The main thing was I hadn't seen Eugene for a few years and I always enjoy when we do get together. Roll on to last week and my darling wife who I love dearly, agreed to us babysitting our newest grandchild on Friday night. This would normally be great but I had a 6:30 flight in the morning. I was not going to get much sleep. I had also set my sights on taking part in the Glasgow Parkrun. This was renamed the Pollock Park Parkrun because there are now 4 parkruns in Glasgow. However Pollock was the first in Scotland and one of the f...