It’s always super exciting whenever someone meets a parkrun milestone ...but it’s especially wonderful when it’s one of our own.

Today Heather, one of Tampere parkrun’s wonderful volunteers, and a RD to boot, braved the not-so-wonderful All Saints’ Day weather to run her 50th parkrun. Well done Heather - lovely to see you wear the red shirt today. You’ve earned it!

55 other participants joined Heather and ran, jogged, walked  (or intervalled) the parkrun course, alongside the grey looking lake in Tampere this morning. Ulla , (as ever), did a fantastic job as RD today, overseeing a run which was surprisingly slippy in one place and which served as a reminder to us here in the soon-to-be-frozen north that winter is closer than ever. Most of us have already switched to winter tyres on our bikes and cars, and today’s conditions reminded me at least that I will need to dust off my winter trainers (spiked runners) very soon.

Juha Simola, who’s currently learning the RD ropes, did a great job of giving the first timers’ brief this morning, welcoming 4 first timers! It is really fabulous that more and more people are finding us ...so glad you ran with us today!

One of the really great things about parkrun is that because we run the same distance and are timed over the exact same course every week (usually!)  it’s possible to measure what progress each of us has made! Most weeks we see runners improve on previous times,  and it was great to see another 5 PBs (Personal Bests) recorded today. Well done everyone!

On a personal note yours truly seems to be losing time right now. (A couple of weeks ago I blamed the puddles, today I blame the icy patch hahaha ... in reality I simply need to concentrate a bit more, stop daydreaming and put in a tiny bit more effort while I run!)

Joking aside, my personal testimony is I am so very glad I found the wonderfully welcoming community of parkrun here in Tampere and started taking part as regularly as I can possibly manage! I really look forward to participating and while it’s not at all easy to get up early on these cold, wet, dark mornings, I really do find it worth getting myself to another city week after week (and yes even worth dragging myself  out of bed early on a Saturday morning!) just to be part of parkrun!

Postrun coffee is very important to many of us!

Our regular cafe was closed today for All Saints so we met up in one of our alternative cafes, Ciao. We were so many at the postrun coffee today that we caused quite a queue ...and many of us stayed on chatting for quite a lot longer than usual, which was really lovely.

We meet every week on Saturdays at 9:30am. Join us next week, if you can!

If you’d like to volunteer to eg help set up/ pack up or indeed help run the parkrun (we need timekeepers and someone to distribute and scan the tokens) let us know. Your help would be very much appreciated!

Lorna KOSKELA, en route back to equally cold, dark and slippery Turku!