04Mar/16

Bushy Refreshed – March 19th

A message from Mark;

As you probably know Bushy is the home of parkruns and now attracts over 1100 every week, yes really! It’s a lovely flat one loop course with a chance for supporters to cheer and take photos of runners at the start, the 4k mark and the finish.

The aim is to create an opportunity for us to spend time with our fellow churchrunners and, more importantly, with our running friends at Bushy.

We, Refresh Runners, entered our first mob match at Nonsuch parkrun in 2013 and had a great time with our mainly non-church team and 3 other churches, think there were about 50 of us. It’s great to see how you folks have helped this outreach grow. I’ve been plugging it on the UK Sports Ministries website and every opportunity I get.

Saturday 19th March, 2016 is the date and the address is Bushy Park, Teddington. The main southern side entrance is on Hampton Court Road, I can only find the postcode for the Palace not the Park which is very close and is KT8 9AU. It’s a 20 minute walk from Hampton Court Train station.

Usual start at 9.00am.
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19Jan/16

The ‘Riddlesdown’ that wasn’t – Virtual

Having realised we had to cancel our Riddlesdown mob match over health and safety concerns (raised quite rightly by Emmanuel Runners) at putting an extra 50-70 runners onto a very muddy and slippery course we didn’t want to miss out completely – so we decided to switch to a virtual mob match instead.

We realise this gave the non-London clubs very little time to react as we had not advertised Riddlesdown nationally, apologies. Just to even things out we will run Riddlesdown in September, but also run a national virtual, rebranded as the churchrunner National Mob Match the same day – September 10th, feel free to put it in your diaries now.

In total there were 143 runners, across 41 parkruns (actually more than the last virtual) running for 18 Christian running groups/churches.

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03Jan/16

Transformation from Riddlesdown to Virtual

We have been made aware that the Riddlesdown parkrun course is getting very wet and somewhat risky, with mud, and some concealed hazards in deep puddles. Consequently we will NOT run the mob match this coming Saturday at that venue. The extra 50-100 runners we bring would not be a good idea. Runner safety is a high priority for us, as is accessibility of events.

Instead we will run the Virtual Mob Match we were due to run in September this Saturday (9th January), and pencil in the September date (10th) for Riddlesdown, subject to confirmation of the convenience of that date to Emmanuel, and Riddlesdown.

That means you can still parkrun this Saturday, as part of a mob match, but at a course of your choosing that you are confident on. It also means our mob matches are still evenly spaced at one every 2 months for the year.

Especially for those who do not like mud, here’s a fairly local list for those in the South London area – Dulwich, Peckham Rye, Crystal Palace and Brockwell are all courses that are tarmac.

God bless,
Tim

24Nov/15

Nonsuch Mob Match (Nov 2015)

Thank you all so much for coming, 15 ran for Chiltern, 21 for Good Shepherd, 1 for Sutton Christian Centre, 6 for Holy Trinity Church Wallington, 1 for Emmanuel, 19 for St Patrick’s, 1 for Springfield, 19 for the Salvation Army, 1 for Refresh (Molesey) Church, 4 for Sutton Vineyard, 2 for New Creation Church London, and 7 for Selsdon Baptist  – 93 runners in total, and from 12 different Churches.

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18Oct/15

Virtual Mob Match (Sep 2015)

Our second ever virtual mob match, and this year we simplified the format a bit, so there was only one weekend to count runners from – this made for a smaller affair, but less cross-referencing trying to make sure we had picked the fastest time for each available runner. Despite this, we have still managed to be late with the results and report – apologies for that, ‘technical problems’.

In total there were 115 runners, across 33 parkruns (actually more than last time) running for 15 Christian running groups/churches – also we had our first ever international element to one of our mob matches, but I’ll come on to that shortly.

Obviously none of this would be possible without parkrun – so a big thank you to them.

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17Sep/15

It’s Virtually Time to Mob Match!

Following on from last year’s ‘Running in Faith a Virtual mob match’

We will be together virtually again on September 19th – clubs we know about have already had their invites and instructions, but if you want to take part give us a shout, all you need to do is just run any parkrun, anywhere in the world, and let us know within 48 hours and we will include you/your Church in the results. Please use the contact form to get in touch, or contact runners@chilternchurch.org.uk direct.