When it’s lagom it’s lagom

GoodGymmers galore at the special Sweden Day extra parkrun at Billdalsparken, volunteering and spreading the word about GoodGym. Four of us had met the previous day in another country - the tiny Nibe parkrun in Denmark for their Constitution Day special parkrun - 4 GGers out of a field of 28!

A quick photocall saw more GoodGymmers (without proof by way of T-shirt membership) appear. Some were lapsed members, some very current and all delighted to make new GoodGym/parkrun buddies.

Melanie was parkwalking, Lucy was on post-event close down and everyone else was helping people in a lovely GoodGym/parkrun way.

The event usually gets 20 or ao parkrunners and they'd been planning for weeks to enable the success of the event, expecting ten times that number. In the end, 218 tokens were given out, 217 of them were returned and the missing 136 isn't expected to be needed for another year!

There were parkrun shaped cookies (any ideas where we can get a GG cookie cutter?) and the longest café queue of any parkrun yet, some 35 minutes and therefore longer than many had spent on the course.

My own official time at 43:01 is nearly ten minutes faster than my actual time but I'm used to that as someone who's towards the back of the field. Vaguely Northern Darren, as ever, ran back to me once he'd finished and walked in with us, taking photos of all the chalk markings the team had made to identify the course and give encouragement - "Free Bird Song", "You have the good form" and "Go parkrunners" which we think was encouragement rather than telling us we should leave!

At the post-parkrun coffee and waffle (the foodstuff and the conversation) VND and I were chatting to the "Medical Support" volunteer (a child psychiatrist named Emily who was grateful only a couple of plasters were needed) introduced us to the Swedish phrase equivalent to "it's the tight level of busy - not too much, not too little" which encapsulates the Swedish take on life - not always striving for excellence but being enough - if it's lagom, it's lagom.

See you all again next year, same time, slightly different place? You're very welcome in Bristol in the mean time.