I spent most of Friday night quietly hoping Dean Castle parkrun would be cancelled.
Not because I'm unfit. Not because I didn't want to run. But because the weather overnight was genuinely, spectacularly awful. Wind, rain, the full Scottish symphony. A cancellation would have let me feel virtuous about wanting to go while also staying in bed. The perfect outcome.
The cancellation never came.
Out of Excuses
Dean Castle Country Park is about as convenient as a parkrun gets for me. Five minutes from the front door, which means I have no commute to blame, no travel logistics to untangle, no plausible reason not to show up. It's the parkrun I've done the most. It's also the one I keep finding excuses to skip, and those excuses always come back to the same thing. The hills.
More on those shortly.
The morning itself turned out to be fine. Cold, properly cold (just above five degrees with a wind chill that pushed it below zero), but the overnight deluge had mostly spent itself. There were puddles around the paddock area but nothing out of the ordinary for a Scottish parkrun in late March. Conditions that, honestly, you'd take. Overcast, cool, a stiff westerly doing its best to make things interesting, but fundamentally runnable.
I may have been somewhat ungrateful for this at the time.
Ally Oop (Twice)
Every parkrun has its character, and Dean Castle's is hills. Short ones, sharp ones, the kind that arrive before your legs have fully committed to the idea of running. Locally known among the regulars as Ally Oop, which is exactly the sort of name you give something that sounds cheerful but is, in practice, not cheerful at all.
The twist? Dean Castle is a two-loop course. Which means you get to experience Ally Oop once, think you've seen the last of it, and then do it again, because this is your life now.
Lap 2 is where you feel it most. Second time on the hills, legs that have already done three kilometres of honest work, and suddenly the watch is reading 6:52 per kilometre like it's perfectly normal to slow down this much. It is perfectly normal. The hills simply demand payment, and lap 2 is where they collect.
The Hailstone Sprint
Hailstones are, it turns out, a very good reason to run faster.
The final 200 to 300 metres of the run coincided with the sky deciding it had been polite for long enough. Out came the hail. Sudden, cold, and entirely personal in the way that hail always feels personal. The finish line had never seemed so attractive. I went from managed effort to maximum available effort in approximately zero seconds.
That final 52 metres clocked in at 5:33 per kilometre pace, my fastest of the day by some margin, driven entirely by the desire to be somewhere with a roof. I will take that.
The Numbers
5.05 km in 33:23 is the official parkrun time. Strava has me at 33:19, which is the watch-to-watch measure, and the four-second gap is the usual difference between crossing the start mat and pressing go. Average pace of 6:36 per kilometre, exactly where I sat for the first two kilometres before the hills started expressing themselves. Elevation gain of 61 metres, most of it concentrated in the laps you'd rather forget.
| Km | Pace | What Was Happening |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6:35 | Settling in, legs warming up, hills being politely threatening |
| 2 | 6:37 | Honest effort, everything fine |
| 3 | 6:28 | Finding a rhythm, feeling briefly smug |
| 4 | 6:52 | Ally Oop, second visit, invoice received |
| 5 | 6:28 | The legs remembered, the hail helped |
| Last 52m | 5:33 | Hailstones |
Heart rate climbed steadily from 134 bpm in the first kilometre to a maximum of 160 bpm at the finish, which tells you the body was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, even if it didn't feel like it at the time. The 5 km best effort came in at 32:55, meaning today was 24 seconds off the top. Given the conditions, the two loops, and the involuntary meteorological sprint finish, I'll take that.
Weather at race time: 5.6°C, feels-like temperature of -1.2°C, with a 33 km/h westerly wind doing its level best to add texture to the experience.
The hills took their toll, the hail motivated the finish, and Strava gave me a suffer score of 98. The watch is either very perceptive or very dramatic.
I'll Be Back
As Arnie once said.
Dean Castle remains the most local parkrun I have, the one I've run the most, and the one whose hills I will continue to have a complicated relationship with. The plan is always to come back sooner. The hills ensure that plan requires active negotiation with my legs.
But the course is good. The park is good. And if the worst thing that happens is some hailstones and a slow lap 2, that's a Saturday morning I'll take.
Just maybe not next week.
Dean Castle Country Park parkrun takes place every Saturday at 9:30am in Kilmarnock. Free, timed, and occasionally hailstone-assisted.