Last Saturday Amy and Andy decided that it was finally time to give the Milton Keynes Parkrun a go. It is half a mile from home at Willen Lake and is a free, accurately measured 5K that takes place at 9am every Saturday morning. It has only taken 41 weeks for them to make it.

There are 49 different races around the country so you are rarely likely to be too far from one. They are all 5K and very informal, but necessarily all on Saturday morning so check the details for each one individually.

They would highly recommend it to anyone who fancies a FREE low key race on a Saturday morning. All you have to do is go to the website www.parkrun.com and follow the instructions to print out a barcode before 6pm on the Friday. Then just turn up with the barcode at any Parkrun and it will be scanned at the end so the results are recorded. Results are then sent out by e-mail about an hour after the finish and they are really comprehensive. They track how many you have done, your times, give you an age grading and all sorts of other stuff. They even take your photo and put it on the website too as long as you are not Andy (Think the lens may have broken at that moment).

As an example, this week the race had 121 finishers and was won in a course record time of 16:01, then after a bit of a gap had regular finishers all the way to 39:46. If you were outside the first 15 you also got a £5 discount voucher for Sweatshop (as the chap giving them out finished 15^th!). They even give laminating pouches for your barcode so you don't need to reprint every week!

FYI – Amy jogged round to test her dodgy leg and finished 51^st in 23:45 whilst Andy had a lonely in 2^nd place in 17:33.