Last Saturday Amy and Andy decided that it was finally time to give the Milton Keynes Parkrun a go. It is half a mile from home at Willen Lake and is a free, accurately measured 5K that takes place at 9am every Saturday morning. It has only taken 41 weeks for them to make it.

There are 49 different races around the country so you are rarely likely to be too far from one. They are all 5K and very informal, but necessarily all on Saturday morning so check the details for each one individually.

They would highly recommend it to anyone who fancies a FREE low key race on a Saturday morning. All you have to do is go to the website www.parkrun.com and follow the instructions to print out a barcode before 6pm on the Friday. Then just turn up with the barcode at any Parkrun and it will be scanned at the end so the results are recorded. Results are then sent out by e-mail about an hour after the finish and they are really comprehensive. They track how many you have done, your times, give you an age grading and all sorts of other stuff. They even take your photo and put it on the website too as long as you are not Andy (Think the lens may have broken at that moment). read more

Last weekend Pete Mackrell went off on his own to darkest Oxfordshire to take part in the Abingdon marathon. Having been thrawted by injury when runing very well last year, he has kep this plans pretty quiet, but has put in a couple of reasonable performances in the last few weeks.

On what was a cool, dry day with practically no wind, the 9am start was perfect for marathon running and with Pete's eyes firmly fixed on beating Joby's leading marathon time of the year he set off at a good pace. He was hoping that if he didn't slow too much in the second half, he even had a chance of sneaking under 3 hours on the flat rural course. read more

On Sunday, despite having played a very active part in the start of the cross-country season a couple of LBAC runners decided that one race a weekend wasn't enough.

First up, Jane Sauer took on the Herts 10K, which takes place in St Albans in aid of the Grove House charity. Following three weeks without running at all and a bit of a bug this week, she completed the course in 52.51 and was very pleased but unsurprsingly finished with aching legs.

Gary Stratford was the other hard core athlete who clearly felt that the hills of Oxfordshire weren't enough. He therefore made the short trip over to Tring to do the Ridgeway run. This consists of approximately nine miles of off-road running across the Ridgeway, South of Tring and includes a number of "challenging" hills! Gary managed to complete the course in seventy minutes and finished 45^th out of 474 people, with a pretty good effort for the second day running. Roger Seldon was four minutes behind Gary to finish in seventy-four minutes. read more

The new winter season got under way this weekend with the big first fixture of the Chiltern Cross-country League at Shotover Hill in Oxford. The first thing that has to be said is a huge thanks and congratulations to every one of the 34 runners who made it over to the event to support the club and do their bit. There were some great runs generally, but what stood out overall was what huge difference it made to have such a strong team effort.

The first runners out on the course were the U11's and Mathilde Sammons was the club's only representative, in what was her first race in the league. She put in a great effort to finish in 55^th position and then stayed for the whole day with her Dad Mark, to support all of the other races which was greatly appreciated. Exactly the same applies to Izzy Bidlake-Hull who ran in the U13 girls and finished in 65^th position and gained valuable points in our bid to stay in division one for the first time in many years. read more