Adventures in the frost

Halfway home from Heathrow Airport early on a Saturday morning, I decide to see if there's a parkrun nearby ...

Sunday's run in the frost with Taz and Nick. Photograph: Taz Babiker

I had an early start on Saturday: a 2:30am alarm call to get up and drive my eldest daughter to Heathrow Airport. Halfway home, stopped for coffee in a motorway service station, I realised it was just after 8am, on a Saturday. I had my running kit in the car with me. “I wonder if there’s a parkrun nearby?”

I pulled up the parkrun website on my phone, and sure enough, there were a few less than 20 minutes drive away. I skimmed their pages for location info, and to see which course looked the most interesting, then decided on the Henstridge Airfield parkrun, plugged the postcode into Google Maps and set off to go for a morning run with a few hundred complete strangers. The wonder of modern technology, I thought. The brilliant simplicity of parkrun.

The dawn sky was a cascade of pinks and yellows as I drove, the frozen fields on either side a brilliant, sparkling white. It was a wonderful morning for a run.