I ran Gibside Night Run for the first time in 2015, and since then it’s made the list of ‘races I want to run’ every year – but this is the first year I’ve actually made it back: I missed one of the intermediary years due to illness, and another due to it clashing with another night race J had booked us all on to. This year, I managed to sucker B into attending me as a late entry and we both headed off to Gibside with G as official bagholder for the fee of 1 post-race pizza!
I’d remembered some stretches suprisingly well given it’s 3 years since I last did it, and had blissfully forgotten the length of some of the hills, and the steepness of the second-to-last one! I’ve run at Gibside enough times to know there’s always a hill near the start – it doesn’t matter which way you go, unless you’re just doing the Avenue and back you are going to hit a hill.
There wasn’t a huge amount of chatting up the first loooong hill, but we both made it to the top maintaining a steady jog, and passing several people who’d dropped to a walk from about halfway up. One of the great things about hill training and having pretty much any local run you try to do featuring at least one hill in it somewhere is you get to be pretty unphased unless they’re particularly long and/or steep. It was a marked difference in approach to last time I did this race, where I definitely walked every one of the uphills after the first few steps up them.
The one thing that wasn’t different was how much I enjoyed it – this is very much a fun run; it’s not chocka with club runners, it’s popular with families, walkers, people with dogs, you name it! It’s very low pressure and at 6km is a distance you can either push yourself over or just kick back and enjoy it.
Last time I ran this, and one of the other occasions where I spectated and ate all of the pizza, runners were given a drawstring bag and a medal at the end; this year was the addition of a funky purple and pink buff – and I like that they’ve made it Gibside specific instead of just a generic National Trust one – makes it feel a bit more special and exclusive 🙂 No doubt there’ll turn out to be another National Trust race later in the year I don’t know about yet with the same gear at the end to undermine that comment. I also noticed when I got home into my very dark living room, that the orange on the medal is glow in the dark! May have to hang it somewhere like the bathroom where it can keep my glow-in-the-dark writbands comapny on their loo-roll holder.
All in all, I loved this race all over again – and it’ll not just be me that’s back next year: B’s already talking about doing it again, G may give it a go and if she’s not working I’m sure we can drag J along! The more the merrier 😉
You can download a GPX file of this route from my Dropbox account here:
GPX file for route and elevation
Blue Runnings 
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