Feedback: Saturday 9th May 2015: Deer Park

FEEDBACK ON SATURDAY MAY 10TH’S DEER PARK ROUTE

It was dark and windy in the Deer Park car park on Saturday morning but 29 souls managed to find the meeting point, despite the lady in the Googlemaps app sending us all on a wild goose chase into a cul-de-sac!

This route was a new one for the group, although a few of us have run it in the past couple of years as official participants in the annual VWS event.* The first half of the route consists of a loop in the direction of the southern suburbs, and the second half a straight out-and-back towards Tafelberg Road.  It’s an undulating route with lots of devilishly short, sharp ascents that require walking but, strangely, a seemingly unequal number of downhills. To spice things up a little, the main group headed off on a variant right from the very start, so they improvised pretty much the whole route but by all accounts enjoyed the scenery and company very much. The other two groups did manage to follow the intended track despite an almost-miss at the get-go! (*It was memory that prevented us from following in the footsteps of the main group rather than map-reading skills.)

The Main group was led by Richard and they covered 12.87km in an hour and 41 minutes, while the Recovery group, led by Pete, reported an 8.5km roller-coaster run in just over 2 hours. The Recovery group did 10.36kms in about an hour and a half.

It was one of ‘those’ days though: Mrs Googlemaps' misdirections, the lost main group, the disproportionate ascents… even the breakfast at the Deer Park Café afterwards was jinxed as there was load shedding and no decent coffee! Nevertheless, great fun was had by all.

A collection was taken for the VWS firefighters and we raised R1,350.00 Thank you. 

None of the groups managed to take any group photos (probably due to the huffing and puffing and searching for the right path) but we do have some lovely cloud images and views from Lize, Mmama and Craig.