Going for a 'U'

My first parkrun in Africa - we were down on the coast south of Durban running through the forest surrounding the Umdoni Golf Club. My Strava took a while to get used to working in the southern hemisphere - looking at the Strava trace you can see it's all over the pace for the first k! We now just have J, V and Z to bag - there's no X - we seemed to have picked up most of the letters of the alphabet without trying but clearly a bit more planning is required to cross of the last few letters and become 'parkrun alphabeteers'. This was a wonderful course which involved some wide trails interspersed with narrow wiggly tracks through the forest.

Phew - you're heavy!

And here's me emerging from one of the wiggly bits bringing up the rear behind Tania and Siena who, together with various other in-laws and relatives, gamely got up early and joined us in the parkrun. The bonus that everyone was looking forward to was a well earned breakfast at the Umdoni Golf Club for which Tania very kindly stood the bill. Vicky had a great run and really enjoyed this off road course - no wild creatures encountered en route (but see below) - her time was 33:58 and she was first of 9 in her age group. A young lad nipped past me at the uphill finish and I had to settle for 4th overall in 23:19 - astonishing that I nicked the V65 record by one second! Parkrun is incredibly popular in South Africa - one of reasons being that a leading health insurer awards points to its members for completing parkruns - there were 140 runners here but just up the coast in Durban the North Beach parkrun has had well over 2000 runners at various times!

Who are you looking at?

Pardon the fuzzy photo but this was taken from the car window on our way out of the golf club. This seems to be a rare white springbok who wandered past unconcerned as we bounced around on the dirt track. Apparently this is a colour mutation rather than an albino animal but it was still a rare treat to see one of these fine creatures.  Lots of other wild life to be seen down here on the coast including the magnificent African Fish Eagle which we saw plunging down in the breakers to catch its prey and other birds new to us including the bright Yellow Weaver and the secretive Mocking Cliff Chaff which I spotted out of the corner of my eye under a bush - what eagle eyes I have!