Riddrie Park, Molendinar Park, Robroyston Park
Run time: 31:19
Distance covered: 3.30m (5.31km)
Soundtrack: New Yorker Radio Hour podcast
Conditions: overcast, muggy
Working all weekend for a book deadline meant it had been five days since my previous run, which itself was pretty hard going as that had been the first in eight days. This one, thanks to hills, was even tougher.
I started out across where I left off a month or two ago, across the road from Hogganfield Park.
Riddrie Park doubles as a cemetery, and from the newness of some of the gravestones toward the top of the park, it feels like the cemetery is slowly expanding to take over the whole park. There are great views south over the city from the top of the hill. If you like graveyards, you'll like this park. If you don't... well, there's not much else to this one.
Down the hill and along Provanmill Road to Molendinar Park, which is challenging to find on Google, because it's the name of a local housing association. This one didn't take long to cover, just a bog-standard local playpark.
This is where the run started to get tough, thanks to me losing some fitness over the past month. My relative unfamiliarity with the area didn't help either. I know most of the south side, the east and the west end like the back of my hand, but the north is undiscovered country. There isn't a whole lot to take you out there unless you're visiting someone at HMP Barlinnie. It's mostly residential suburbs, largely council housing that was good quality in the 60s, but has deteriorated a lot, all divided up by two motorways.
Anyway, as usual I plotted out the run in two dimensions, working out a route that would take me by all three parks on this run, but I couldn't see from the map that it would involve backtracking downhill and running back up the hill. In retrospect I ought to have run Riddrie to Robroyston to Molendinar, but hey, you live and learn.
From Molendinar, I had to run back up a different side of the same hill I had descended from the top of the cemetery. It was hard going. It reminded me of the early days pushing myself to 5k. I really wanted to stop. But stopping would have meant coming back, so I made myself keep going, up the hill, across the railway line, across the M80...
...all the way to Robroyston Park.
Robroyston Park is one of those random gaps in the urban sprawl (in this case, the former site of an open cast mine and brick worls) where they've just let the grass go, put in some paths and a marshland and called it a woodland park. And it's... fine, i guess. It's green space and it's fine for walking the dog or going for a stroll, but it really doesn't have the satisfying sense of place of the planned Victorian parks elsewhere in the city.
I was really glad to hit my 5k and stop this time.
A tough run, none of the parks a classic, but a nice view from the top of Riddrie Park. I'm aiming to get back to more regular runs, so with any luck it won't be as tough next time.
Incredibly, that's 84 parks down, 30 or so to go.
Working all weekend for a book deadline meant it had been five days since my previous run, which itself was pretty hard going as that had been the first in eight days. This one, thanks to hills, was even tougher.
I started out across where I left off a month or two ago, across the road from Hogganfield Park.
Riddrie Park doubles as a cemetery, and from the newness of some of the gravestones toward the top of the park, it feels like the cemetery is slowly expanding to take over the whole park. There are great views south over the city from the top of the hill. If you like graveyards, you'll like this park. If you don't... well, there's not much else to this one.
Down the hill and along Provanmill Road to Molendinar Park, which is challenging to find on Google, because it's the name of a local housing association. This one didn't take long to cover, just a bog-standard local playpark.
This is where the run started to get tough, thanks to me losing some fitness over the past month. My relative unfamiliarity with the area didn't help either. I know most of the south side, the east and the west end like the back of my hand, but the north is undiscovered country. There isn't a whole lot to take you out there unless you're visiting someone at HMP Barlinnie. It's mostly residential suburbs, largely council housing that was good quality in the 60s, but has deteriorated a lot, all divided up by two motorways.
Anyway, as usual I plotted out the run in two dimensions, working out a route that would take me by all three parks on this run, but I couldn't see from the map that it would involve backtracking downhill and running back up the hill. In retrospect I ought to have run Riddrie to Robroyston to Molendinar, but hey, you live and learn.
From Molendinar, I had to run back up a different side of the same hill I had descended from the top of the cemetery. It was hard going. It reminded me of the early days pushing myself to 5k. I really wanted to stop. But stopping would have meant coming back, so I made myself keep going, up the hill, across the railway line, across the M80...
...all the way to Robroyston Park.
Robroyston Park is one of those random gaps in the urban sprawl (in this case, the former site of an open cast mine and brick worls) where they've just let the grass go, put in some paths and a marshland and called it a woodland park. And it's... fine, i guess. It's green space and it's fine for walking the dog or going for a stroll, but it really doesn't have the satisfying sense of place of the planned Victorian parks elsewhere in the city.
I was really glad to hit my 5k and stop this time.
A tough run, none of the parks a classic, but a nice view from the top of Riddrie Park. I'm aiming to get back to more regular runs, so with any luck it won't be as tough next time.
Incredibly, that's 84 parks down, 30 or so to go.
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