Our tour of the London+ parkruns continued in alphabetical order as we made our way to Banstead Woods parkrun. The event is well established, with the inaugural run taking place in June 2007, so it’s one of the older London parkrun locations. There is a real feeling of stepping through the parkrun wormhole when you attend locations such as Banstead Woods; the volunteer team have “parkrun volunteer” jackets and some of the volunteer tops refer to roles that have now changed e.g. disc distribution rather than the now ubiquitous barcode system.
We try to arrive early when we’re visiting a new parkrun site, primarily in case we get lost, and we certainly needed the extra time to walk from the car park up to the start / finish area. There was plenty of car parking available at Park Farm, Holly Lane (as documented on the course page) and we followed a bunch of parkrunners resplendent in their parkrun shirts up the trail path into the woods.
The finish area is the first point of call and we left our tops & drinks to the side before going for a warm-up jog up the hill and past the start line. The course consists of one slightly larger loop through the woods followed by the same loop that’s a tad smaller (the finish funnel is just before a hill that leads to the start area).
We were taking it easy today so let the majority of the field spread out in front of us as we chatted on our pootle through the woods. The trail is mostly firm, although may get wetter and challenging during the winter, and the second half of each loop is a glorious downhill romp that gets faster the further you progress. We agreed that a future visit on fast legs would be called for because the down section of trail was fantastic to run on and we would love to throw ourselves down without the brakes on.
So another London parkrun was crossed off our list and we had a great time on our visit to Banstead Woods parkrun.
Running Dan parkrun result:
- parkrun time: 0:27:39
- Garmin time: 0:27:39
- Finish position: 100 / 144
- Gender position: 83 / 99
- Age category: VM40-44
- Age grade: 49.37 %
