Dear Green Places

Sometimes I kick myself (but not too hard, I bruise easy...) at how lucky I am to live in Glasgow. With its diverse population and communities, world-renowned educational and cultural institutions, not to mention one thousand and one ways to spend your time or your hard-earned buck. But recently I've also been reminded how dear our green places are, especially now that I use them to run in, through, and around.

Being a southsider I have loads of parks to choose from, practically on my doorstep. Pollok Park is a fave Saturday morning locale since I started going along to parkrun regularly last year, and I ran it yesterday, for the first time since December. Even though my training lately has reduced to going out twice a week, I do feel fitter than the last time I ran the 5k there and so was a bit disappointed not to better my personal best on Saturday morning....however, the beauty of parkrun is that there's always next week. And I did manage to run up the hill from hell both times without stopping, a personal achievement, and no mean feat if you have been and know what I'm talking about!

Last Sunday I took a wee notion to run in an entirely different direction to normal, and ended up in Linn Park. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon I was a bit wary running into a park alone that I had only been to once in my life, but the plus side of running in an unknown environment was not realising just how tough it was about to get...A river runs through the park and on one side is a lovely flat trail nestling alongside the lazy river while on the other is a winding narrow path consisting of a rollercoaster ride of steep steps up and down, obviously dreamt up by some psychopathic park designer with a grudge against runners, walkers, or anything else on two feet.

With typical (for me) beginner's luck, I ended up on the Himalayan side. As much as I would love to tell you I took on the hills with gusto, bounding up and down them in two single leaps each time, my feeble attempt ended up being closer to crawling on all fours than actual running. Once I reached the flat ground again my legs were useless lumps of lead and I conceded defeat to a pair of very dapper old ladies out for an afternoon stroll who managed to overtake me at all of their 2.5 mph pace.

Ignorance certainly is bliss to me, so since the course for the Women's 10k has been officially announced, I've been too nervous to look at it very closely. However, a friend was telling me that the route takes in not one but two parks, Bellahouston (which for my shame I have never ever been in) and Pollok. Again, I think to myself, how lucky I am to live in a city with so many lush green spaces to run through, home to different species of Glaswegian wildlife, and lots of animals and plants too I hear. ;-)

When I'm on the home strait of the 10k through Bellahouston and maybe struggling a bit, one thing that will keep me going is a long-held wee dream of mine: which is to one day go for a run through one of the most famous city parks in the world, and somewhere very close to my heart, Central Park in New York.

And I'm not talking about doing the New York Marathon. No, I just mean like when you see shots of people jogging in films or tv shows which are set in New York (remember all those key moments from Sex and The City which happened in Central Park? eg Charlotte meeting her future pet dog "Elizabeth Taylor", or the time when Miranda moved into the 7 minute mile running group after another disastrous 'romantic' encounter, the details of which I won't go into here, SATC fans will know what I mean!), well I want to do that someday.

I've been to New York several times before and spent memorable hours in Central Park, but only got the courage to take up running in the last year or so. And I don't think I'll be able to truly say I have had the complete Manhattan-ite experience until I've jogged through the city's iconic park on a sunny spring day...

Return flight to New York, £499. Running through Central Park, priceless :-)

How about you? What's your favourite real-life, or fantasy, park run?