Chris Worfolk's Blog

Jubilee parkrun is located in the town of Spennymoor, just over the border into County Durham. It’s a lovely park with a bowling green, two playgrounds and some sports fields. The course is four laps of the park and despite it being quite a mild slope, as each lap goes up and down twice, you end up with a lot of elevation gain from going from the bottom of the park to the top nine times.

Jubilee means I finally have my J. Just Z missing from my alphabet now. Thank you to all of the friendly volunteers for making the trip worthwhile.

I’ve started collecting my writings on how society makes us mentally ill and published them on a Substack called Made Unwell. These ideas are a result my lived experience of working in psychology, but they don’t fit on the official blogs of my clinics, nor do they fit on my personal blog. So here they are.

In the latest series of Leeds Autism Practice events, we looked at the cost of burnout and how to recover from it. This was my fast time collaborating on an event and I’m very grateful to Marta for all of the hard work she put in. It was well received by the audience who said it resonated strongly, as well as containing lots of useful information.

We went to the beach. Filey is a bit rubbish. They don’t have any free public toilets anymore. Sand was okay, though. We made a sandcastle.

Unfortunately, it was high tide at 8am so it was going out most of the day and never came back in while we wer there. Luckily, Little Bear did most of the work.

North Yorkshire Water Park is an inline water park offering swimming, kayaking, paddleboarding, wakeboarding and other such activities. They also have a parkrun on a Saturday morning that involves two laps of the trail around the lake. It’s a lovely venue with toilets and a cafe offering hot cooked food.

I needed a north for the compass club challenge, adding to the west I got from Newcastle West.

Happy Leeds Pride!

Now run by the Brownlee Foundation, Ripon Triathlon takes place on Ripon race course. I have raced here before in 2022 when I did Dalesman but this was my first time back.

We decided to make a day of it, which meant getting up at the eye watering time of 4:30 to get on the road by 5:30 and there by 6:30. In the end, they did not close transition at 7:30 so I could have comfortably arrived at least 30 minutes later. Lesson for next time.

They did not announce the water temperature until just before the race so we were all nervously waiting to find out if we could wear wetsuits or not. In the end, we could. Which was great because I was pretty anxious anyway during the swim. I did some breaststroke and then felt more confident coming up to the first buoy. I then felt panicked again on the way back before finally getting into it and finishing strong.

The lake was less weedy than I remembered. But the last time I swam here it was possibly the weediest swim I’ve ever done, so the bar was pretty high.

The bike course was lovely. Very flat. Which again, contrasted with the 2,000 metres of elevation gain I had to take on last time I raced here. The course was about 24 km long and I couldn’t remember the exact distance so I wasn’t too sure when it was going to end.

Finally, onto the run. It takes a lot of the same route as Dalesman did, but without the long out-and-back stretch. I paused half way through to watch a baby hedgehog cross the road. Time well wasted in my opinion. And then it was into the finish.

My time was:

1:36:24

And my splits were:

I couldn’t quite keep up with the race winner, Alistair Brownlee, who finished in 1:01:35.

I’ve been in the process of moving offices just up the road onto Park Square. We’ve been working for the past few weeks on folding chairs and whatever else I had around. But the sofa has not arrived and the lamps arrived shortly after this photo was taken, too. I’m most excited about my bowl of fidgets.

Hyde Park Harriers is 20 years old! To celebrate, we had a do at Headingley Stadium. Thank you to Toby and the organising committee for making it happen. And Beth for the anniversary cupcakes!

There is never a bad reason to visit Doncaster. But it is especially nice when you are there to do Sandall Park parkrun. It is two-and-a-bit laps around the park, tarmac and grass, and flat by Yorkshire standards.

This ticks off the snakes challenge for me: Skipton, Selby, Shanganagh, Sport Ireland Campus, St Anne’s, Stormont, SETU Arena, Sligo, Sheffield Castle and Sandall Park.