Running the Parks

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. T...