I have previously blogged about how (like many people it seems) my passion for park run has grown over the previous decade. I have completed the ‘A to Z challenge’ which in turn has contributed to a fair amount of park run tourism and am closing in on five hundred completed events. Despite all of the above and living three hours away from the venue, one particular location to run has been on my bucket list for a while now.

For those of you who are not already aware the question as to why this is the case is a very good one. There are over eight hundred park runs in the UK currently but both as a statistical fact and by sheer reputation, Great Yarmouth North Beech stands out as the most difficult. It’s run entirely on sand which even the fearsome uphill climbs of places like Whinlatter Forest cannot emulate for removing oxygen from your lungs and injecting pain into your ankles and knees.

Unsurprisingly there are a fair few other blogs and newspaper articles about the event but I can save you time by summarising the overall feedback on the course in one word. Brutal.

I arrived with my son and our concerns weren’t helped when the first two people we met were two ladies in running club vests who said their best hope was to be able to ‘run walk it’. The average park run finish time is twenty eight minutes while for Great Yarmouth North Beech it’s a fraction over thirty nine minutes. The final problem was even at the 9am start time it was a perfect summer’s day with no cloud cover.

We were joined by exactly fifty other lunatics at the start line. Including three people who had cycled the one hundred and sixty miles from Nottingham to be there. I believe this was in memory of a husband who had passed away and to raise money for the British Heart Foundation, so massive respect to them for completing that.

All things being relative the first part of the course wasn’t horrifically bad, running down to and then along the seafront you can at least find a little bit of shingle and compacted sand to plant your feet in. Being at the seaside and therefore close to the obligatory funfair it’s probably the only park run where the sounds of ‘Summer Nights’ from Grease are in earshot.

It’s a two lap course and once you get away from the seafront and on to the powdered slippery sand is when it gets really really tough, this is then compounded by labouring up a hill before you get round to the seafront again. Below is me on the aforementioned sand. Eventually I did get round in just under the average time. I was more happy that I didn’t need to walk at any point which would have been my target at the beginning.

Being a community event and a run not a race, park run doesn’t have the concept of a winner as such but a first finisher. In this case it was my son (shown below) and this completed an excellent morning for us both.

With the box for completing the UK’s hardest park run now firmly ticked I think it’s safe to say we won’t be back to tackle it again. So, saving the best to last it only remains to thank the fantastic volunteers there. Rhea Sloman gave an excellent and amusing first timers briefing while all the marshals were encouraging on the course as we battled round. Time to find our next park run challenge now but in terms of difficulty I can’t see how Great Yarmouth North Beech can ever be beaten.