For the first Sunday in half term I headed off to junior parkrun to marshal. It was such a beautiful day, so I ran the slightly long way there, enjoying all the autumn colours.
Ready in my high viz/ pancakes for after/ my view/ feeling official with a whistle!
A few minutes before there were hardly any runners, but with around 5 minutes to go there were loads of people there. My point was the first spot, so I could see the start/finish area and meant I could have a nice chat with some of the other volunteers before walking to my spot. I always feel very official when given the whistle, but thankfully I didn’t need to use it.
Once finished I ran home and then made myself some pancakes with maple apples (home grown apples from our garden).
It was such a beautiful day that we headed to Panshanger for a walk and of course a delicious drink from Planted Coffee Co ( a pumpkin chai latte). On a side note, at the beginning of the year I bought one of these Joseph Joseph reusable mugs. I have a few others, but didn’t often use them as I didn’t like the drinking opening being uncovered (just imagine all the germs hanging about inside your bag etc). This solves that issue as there is a little flap that closes over the drinking opening, so it’s kept clean when being carried around. It’s not an insulating one, but then I don’t want one for a take away drink- I want to drink that straight away. (I have a Bodum one that I take to work- I make my tea at home and then by mid morning it’s cool enough to drink). Half a million single-use coffee cups are thrown away every day in the UK and only 0.25% of these are recycled which is just shocking. Just picture that amount of coffee cups in landfill every day. I do think that we might need to be forced into this (eg by charging a lot more for the takeaway cups like they did with plastic bags in supermarkets), and I would recommend this if you often get a takeaway drink. I’ll step off my soap box now.
One day in half term I headed up to Letchworth for a walk around (I even saw one of their famous black squirrels) and a visit to Vutie Beets- a chai latte and the fluffiest most delicious pancakes, and time to chill out.
One day I got the train down to Brighton to visit a friend. The trains were not playing ball so I ended up spending longer on trains than I did actually in Brighton, but we managed to fit a lot in- a walk to Hove, a visit to Bird and Blend (there’s the cup again), lunch at Cafe Coho and a wander around the lanes.
I had a few chilled out days with runs in the autumn and plenty of tea (and matcha) at home.
And I was very excited on Friday to be able to join in with the club run, which is a run and then coffee (well, tea for me) after. It’s so good to have social time together and is a great treat for the holidays.
We were off to London for the weekend (including a new parkrun)- coming up next!
