First park run a roaring success
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After 7 months in the planning, fundraising and getting support from the public Saturday witnessed the first Ury Riverside parkrun.
Run Director for the day was Paul Douglas who explained the background to the event before sending them on their way to a 5k run or walk overseen my parkrun ambassador Tom Fardon .
There were representatives of 35 different clubs who took part.
Speaking after the event Paul, a regular park runner, explained: "While I love going to events in Ellon and Aberdeen , in other parts of the country and abroad I felt that Inverurie would have an appetite for a parkrun.
"The Ury Riverside Park group, the charity who look after the park have allowed us to use the paths on the understanding we respect other park users .
"Parkrun is an international organisation and there are over fifty in Scotland where at 9.30am every Saturday morning you can go out and join fellow runners and walkers in a safe environment.
"It is easy to register with parkrun and I would encourage folk to do so."
He added "This week it was touch and go because of the heavy rain and we heard the Stonehaven parkrun had a late cancellation,- we got lucky with just a few large puddles to negotiate."
While director Laura Copeland was delighted with the turnout as her team of volunteers managed a very wet and soggy inaugural event but incredibly had a 196 runners take part.
She said:" We have an enthusiastic core group but this free event only happens if we get sufficient volunteers every week to manage it.
"Volunteers don't even have to be runners, and don't require to be there every week but maybe once every couple of months or so.
"We look forward to welcoming more runners every week and in this first event we had a visitor from Australia and another from Milan and 22 people who hadn’t done a park run ever.
"We hope this is the start of a great event for the town and would thank all those that have helped in any way to get it off the ground."
The male record is held by Richard Strachan who recorded a time of 16 minutes and 56 seconds.
While female record is by Carolyn Milne who got a time of 20 minutes and 24 seconds.
The Age Grade course is from Carolyn Milne who recorded 93.79 percent (20:24) at the event.
Full results and a complete event history can be found on the Ury Riverside parkrun results page.
