parkrun – 06/12/2025

7 December 2025 - By Steven Alder

This week in the world of parkrun we saw the inaugural of a new local parkrun – ARU Writtle parkrun. We had a few members attending from the club, including William Radley (16:58, claiming the SM30-34 record), Nadia McLeod (23:49, claiming the SW30-34 record), Nichola Beazeley (25:37), Ian Lucas (27:40), Lisa Leader (28:42), Dominique Harts (32:21) and Patrick Hinchliffe (36:09).

Dominique enjoyed the course, who treated it as a progression run this week. She felt the course was perhaps a narrow one but had lovely views and was very pretty, including looking at the horses. Will’s comments meanwhile included that it was windy!

Quick selfie at ARU Writtle parkrun

One of the other local parkruns, Colchester Castle, wasn’t on this week, but we still had our runners attending other locations across the world. Overall from Witham RC we were at Southsea, Maldon Prom, King’s Lynn, Chelmsford Central, Brandon Country Park, Queen Elizabeth, Clacton Seafront, Hockley Woods, Sizewell, Millennium Country (Forest of Marston Vale), Markshall Estate, Brooklyn Bridge (USA!) and, of course, ARU Writtle.

Will coming in 3rd place at ARU Writtle parkrun

The Collins sisters were visiting a popular parkrun location over in the states, completing the course with the scenic Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, crossing over the line together. Adam Hocken collected his 23rd letter of the parkrun alphabet challenge at Queen Elizabeth, needing only a U and Z to complete the challenge (see below for more details on the challenge).

The iconic Brooklyn Bridge.

Maldon Prom parkrun saw quite a few of our parkrunners, including Dean Whittaker (23:16), Bill Smythe (23:58), Annalise Etherington (26:40), Lysia Jiggins (34:00), Amy Eyo (34:43), Mary Burns (49:07) and Joe McEwan (49:08).

Jaffa and Finn at Maldon Prom with Andy and Lysia.

A full list of the Witham RC results can be found on the parkrun website.

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parkrun Challenges – The Alphabet Challenge

You can grab the alphabet challenge in as little as 25 parkruns, completing 25 different locations beginning with each letter. For instance, a C at Chelmsford Central, a Q at Queen Elizabeth, H at Hadleigh, G at Great Notley and so on. Some of you may have wondered why you only need 25 letters and not 26… well, no parkruns in the world start with an X, so this one has been discounted (for now, maybe this will change in the future?). Excluding the X, the rarest letter in the world is Q, with the 11th one only starting up last week in Herefordshire. Another difficulty is that in the UK there are no parkruns beginning with a Z, so to complete the challenge you’ll need to visit an international parkrun location, with the Netherlands being the closest to Witham.