#34 - Halloween

 


You know it's Halloween when you have toffee apples for breakfast.

It seems like everyone was willing to get into the spirit of the occasion with lots of dressing up and cake bakes. 


We think everyone was looking for an excuse to celebrate and engage in festivities. It was sad that the great efforts by Fingal Council with the display at the Castle had to be scaled down but it was just unsafe with the amount of people who turned up. It is easy to forget that about 45 to 50 thousand people live within 5km of the Castle. 
The figures and decorations have been removed to enable the projection show to go ahead again and it will be on between 5pm and 10pm tonight. It might be safe and reasonable to have a little drive by to take in what was visually stunning.

 Now some running

We seem to be a little behind Tralee this week but we are sure there are a good few of you to log your runs yet. If you need an incentive to log your run then have a look at the leader board for Ireland:


We had to do a quick double-take and then go off and look up where in heaven was Clonbur Woods? The wilds of Galway apparently.  We had a chat with Yvonne and Shauna from Clonbur and they had little awareness that there was any form of inter-parkrun competition. It was in fact a bit of a shock to them that not only were they 3rd in the table but they had the River Valley community gunning for them.

Meanwhile St Annes have firmly got the bit between their teeth now and have a grip on the top spot. We can take some heart that in the Dublin vs Kerry competition we are still ahead but it is still early and we may yet see a Kerry victory for the first time.

We won't even mention the Northside vs Southside battle as we really do not want to embarrass the Southside anymore than they already are!

Our Results

This weeks first finisher is none other than Stephen Reid. Is that a first Stephen. Huge well done. Despite Cecile's best efforts she was still the female first finisher this week. It must be all the cakes and sweets!
Our first male junior was Conor Reid while our first female junior was super timekeeper Jessica Reid.

Stephen you will have your good lady out and training for the Reids to take a clean sweep!

We had no less than 17 Personal Bests (PBs) this week. Fantastic running folks. The full list of PBs are
  • Stephen REID
  • Fergal BEIRNE
  • Ann Marie DALY
  • Rosaline HARRINGTON
  • Alan O'MAHONEY
  • Niall NOLAN
  • Claire MCCARVILLE
  • Fintan CURRAN
  • Sean MCCARTHY
  • David MCCARTHY
  • Aland MOEN
  • Peter CARR
  • Ger BYRNE
  • Rosalind JONES
  • Francesco PETRONI
  • Alan MURPHY
  • Collette BRYSON
We had two first timers this week. Some bloke called Brian Scanlan whose name seems oddly familiar, with 90 parkruns under his belt and 45 at River Valley, not to mention a regular first finisher it is great to see you back and logging. We were also joined by Edyta Szeliga who has no less than 18 RV parkruns to her credit.

The Strava Table 


Topping the Strava table this week was Dave Gargan with a distance of 80.8km. However we would give special mention to Ross who was out climbing Howth head again, not once but twice in one run.

Ross did manage to take the top spot for the longest run with a distance of 28.4km.

In a shock result Bryan Donovan takes the top spot for a the fastest pace with 4:49/km. 

In a bigger shock though is Niall Harte taking the elevation gain with 598m. To put that in perspective Ross climbed Howth twice and gained 489m.

Tales from the WhatsApp 

Little Free Library



The WhatsApp group was very active this week but the standout topic had to be the conversation initiated by Lin who suggested organising a book swap cabinet for the community. A quick discussion and the right person in Fingal council was identified and emails sent to get the permission to get the project rolling. It was also suggested that Swords Tidy Towns and the Swords Mens Shed be invited to get involved.

Hopefully this could be the start of something wonderful.

In other news Tralee are so desperate to gain new parkrunners they recruited an unlikely runner.


..........and Finally

We are keeping it short this week because we are knackered.

Whats are next big target?

Australia!!


Have a great week folks and stay safe! 






 










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