Park run at St Peters, Sydney

I spent nearly two weeks of holidays from 1st Dec to 13th of Dec in Sydney, Brisbane, Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast of Australia. As I always include a running event in my travel itinerary, I tried to register a competitive running event in one of the places I visited but there was none that coincided with the date of my visit. At last I stumbled upon the Park Run held every Saturday at different locations in Australia. Only Sydney's Park Run could fit into my travel itinerary. So Seok Wan and I  registered to be members of St Peters park run group in Sydney so as to satisfy our urge to run in Australia. The run is only 5 km and as members we were given personal bar code which could be downloaded and printed online. The bar code will allow our time to be recorded and we can run in any of the park run held all over the world. 

We were all alone running in the vastness of Sydney Park

Enjoying the scenery while running at our leisure pace

We did not notice this and continued straight another two km

Great!  We had run at Sydney park, Australia

The Park Run which I took part was held on 5th Dec at Sydney Park of St Peters, a suburb of Sydney. The Run started at 8.00 am but we were late almost 20 minutes due to unfamiliarity with the train schedule in Sydney. I was at Sydney Central station and instead of boarding a metro train to St Peters there, I travel to town Hall to board a train to St Peters. That mistake cost us at least half an hour of delay. When we reached the starting venue, some of the fast runners were already coming back. Even though we were late we still participated in the run. The park run organiser briefed us about the track to follow and comforted us to just run with our own leisure. We started our run by following the arrows shown along the track and everything was smooth until we reached the 4th km mark. I was anticipating the finishing line soon but it never appeared. We made a second mistake by over-running the designated 5 km. There were marking on the track asking us to dash to the finishing line but we missed it and continued running until we realized our mistake 2 km later. By the time we returned to the starting point, most of the participants had left. That is the beauty of park run where we can continue running after the designated 5 km distance. Perhaps the organiser thought we wanted to run more than 5 km and did  not bother us.  

Even though we did not run together with the other park runners and get to know them but it was still a new experience for us running in the vastness of Sydney Park. There were quite a number of joggers who came with their dogs and kids. After the run we had our breakfast at the cafe in the park. There is even a toilet next to the cafe where we changed into our dry clothes to board a train back to Sydney Central and then by Light Rail Transit ( LRT) to our hotel at Darling Harbour.  

So that is our first park run and we are not sure when we will be able to take part in our second park run as the nearest park run to us is in Singapore.