Running the Parks

Date I ran:  26th January 2020 Run time:  34:59 Distance covered:  3.74m (6.02km) Soundtrack:  Laura Lippman,  The Lady in the Lake Conditions:  cold, sleet Probably one of the worst runs I've endured in terms of weather conditions. Started off cold but bearable, and a couple of minutes in it started raining, and then the rain turned to sleet. It was not fun to be out there in January in shorts and t-shirt. As a side effect, my phone screen is cracked, and it was so wet that I couldn't end the Strava session which meant I had to keep running, frantically trying to unlock my phone with numb fingers, like a really terrible version of Speed. But anyway, the park. Queens Park is one I've visited a fair amount, so it wasn't new territory for me. It's one of the major parks in the city, and like many it was originally on land owned by a wealthy family, in this case the Maxwells of Pollok. Wikipedia reports that it was Glasgow's third park (I'

Date I ran:  24th January 2020 Run time:  43:40 Distance covered:  4.71m (7.58km) Soundtrack:  Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake Conditions:  drizzly morning Relatively long run from Cambuslang, out to Overtoun Park and back, after the school run. The cool thing about running different routes is it doesn't feel like you're running as far as you are, because it's as much exploration as it is exercise. I've always found the secret to exercise is to distract myself from the fact I'm doing it, and combining a run with a bit of pedestrian exploration is a good way to do it. Overtoun Park is named for the industrialist Lord Overtoun, who was, as standard for a lot of these parks, a rich dude from hundreds of years ago. Overtoun seems to be a particularly controversial one , as his chemical company dumped toxic waste around the area, some of which is still contaminated a couple of centuries later. It's a nice little park, not big enough for a full 5

Run time:  30:02 Distance covered:  3.2m (5.15km) Soundtrack:  Derren Brown,  Confessions of a Conjuror Conditions:  cold morning I grew up on Huntly Drive in Cambuslang, which is a short walk from Cambuslang Park. I was in the park with my buddies every day of those impossibly long summers back in the eighties, riding our bikes, playing soldiers, reading comic books, avoiding bullies, lunging out over precipices on rope swings, climbing rock faces we probably shouldn't have, discovering caves, trying to work up the nerve to venture into the underground culvert that carried the stream under Cairns Road, or the Witch's Tunnel, as it was known. Yes, my childhood was basically a less-supernatural Stephen King novel. The kind of childhood kids don't really have anymore. The park today is very different to the way it was when I was growing up. In the late eighties and early nineties, it was an overgrown wilderness, full of untamed trees and bushes. There were de

Run time:  32:49 Distance covered:  3.55m (5.71km) Soundtrack:  Derren Brown,  Confessions of a Conjuror Conditions:  cold, dry, beautiful sunset These days most people think of Kings Park as an area of the city, rather than a park. I've been to Kings Park countless times, but weirdly, I had never set foot in the park itself. I had to Google it to find out where it was. It's south of Kings Park Avenue, so you don't see it if you're just passing through on one of Glasgow's main arteries across the south side. This park was one of the inspirations behind the whole project. If I had driven or walked within yards of this place so many times without ever visiting, how many more were there like that? As it turns out, a lot . Like a lot of parks of its period, it was originally part of a wealthy estate. The house is still there: Aitkenhead House, which Wikipedia tells me was designed by the architect David Hamilton and built in 1806 for a Wes

Just for fun, and because I'm probably one of the few people who has attempted to visit every park, I've decided to rank them.  It goes without saying, my ranking is entirely subjective, and I haven't spent too long agonising over the placement of each park. These are just gut reactions as I work my way through the parks, and it's simply a rough idea of how much I liked each park.  Apologies if I've graded your favourite park harshly. Maybe I just caught it on a bad day. Linn Park  - 19/03 Kelvingrove Park - 04/10 Victoria Park - 27/08 Maxwell Park - 13/04 Queens Park - 26/01 Cambuslang Park - 21/01 Newlands Park - 19/04 Botanic Gardens - 08/09 Kings Park - 19/01 Alexandra Park - 22/05 Rosshall Park - 05/06 Pollok Park  - 28/03 and 20/08 Rouken Glen Park - 03/09 Glasgow Green - 05/02 Tollcross Park - 15/03 Hogganfield Park - 04/07 Cuningar Loop  - 01/05 Ruchill Park - 22/09 Necropolis - 30/09 Maryhill Park - 27/09 Bellahouston Park - 02/02

Hi. My name is Gavin, and I'm a writer, a runner and a procrastinator. When you put it like that, I pretty much had to start a running blog, didn't I? I write thrillers under the pseudonym Mason Cross, which you can check out on my  website  if you so desire. But this blog is nothing to do with books or writing, at least not directly. In an effort to combat middle-age spread, I started running in 2018, using the excellent BBC  Couch to 5k app . I picked Jo Whiley as my coach. She seems to dislike exercise as much as I do, and is therefore perfect. The app does pretty much what it promises - builds you up with incremental short runs, until you're running nonstop for 30 minutes. To my surprise, I managed to complete the program, and I've kept it up (barring injury) ever since. Something I worked out early on is I'm not a treadmill guy. It's physically easier than running outside, but much harder psychologically, because it's so goddamn monoto