Another one off the Yorkshire parkrun list this week — York Community Woodlands, up on reclaimed land north of the city. I’ll be honest, when I walked the first 400m I wrote the whole thing off as a steady effort. Young trees, wide compacted trail, and on paper that usually means slow.
It didn’t turn out that way. The surface was baked rock hard, the corners are all sweeping rather than sharp, and there’s barely any elevation to speak of. Once I committed to it there was nothing breaking my rhythm, and I came away with 16:40 on a course I genuinely didn’t think had that in it.
If you’re the sort of runner who loves a road parkrun but gets put off trail because you assume you’ll lose 30 or 40 seconds to the ground underneath you, this is the one I’d point you towards first. It’s about as forgiving as trail running gets while still properly counting as trail.
Big thanks as ever to the volunteers and core team at York Community Woodlands — they’re the reason any of this exists on a Saturday morning. Have a watch of the full video to see the course for yourself, and let me know if you’ve run it and what you made of the surface.
Just keep running.
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From the athletes I coach
2:37:14 marathon
Injury prone, and every block is a balance between doing enough volume and tipping him over the edge. Get that balance right and this is what happens: a half marathon best of 1:11:03, a win at the Coventry Half in early 2026, and 2:37:14 in Latvia that May.
Alex, coached athlete
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