What a great way to kick-start the 2026 race season!
What brilliant, well-behaved dogs we had with us at our Irchy Park Canicross event on Sunday morning!
A huge thank you to Paws4Running, Snow Paw Store and Non-stop dogwear for all of their help in enabling us to host this event for the second year. It was great to see so many runners back again for the second running of this race, along with several new runners also joining us for 2026.
It’s important to me that all of the Race Harborough events are accessible and welcoming to runners of all abilities, and we had a full range of runners joining us this weekend, from the current World Champion, Toby Lambert, flying round the course with Bizzy in just 14 minutes and 28 seconds, to a number of runners borrowing Non-stop dogwear kit from the rail to give Canicross running a go for the very first time!
Although we’d had plenty of rain in recent weeks, we are lucky that Irchester Country Park drains fairly well and, other than a couple of slippy mud sections (including one near the start!), most of the mud was just tacky on the surface rather than puddly. Although of course, staying upright on a muddy surface always becomes more of a challenge when attached to a dog!
We are so lucky to have Irchester Country Park on our doorstep. It’s an absolutely stunning park, with a real mix of hard-surface tracks and more technical trails. I know the area well, having run round here for more than a decade now, and have enjoyed introducing plenty of other runners to the park since 2019 on a Saturday morning at our parkrun event.
Last year, I met with Louise, from Paws4Running, to discuss what would sort of course would work for a Canicross event, using Irchester Country Park as a base. Not owning a dog myself, and having never run with one, I needed Louise to share her knowledge. Once I had designed a route, Louise, with dog Pickle, along with another Canicross runner, Reece (with Luna) met me one Saturday morning and I took them out for a test of some of the tracks through the park, so that we could establish what would work well as a 5k route for a new event.
Louise’s initial brief had been ‘somewhere with lots of space at the start and finish areas, lots of interesting trails, several twists and turns, no field edges, and lots for the dogs to look at!’ Hopefully you’ll agree that the route we ran on Sunday delivered all of those things!
I caught up with Louise and Michelle a few weeks ago on their Canicross Conversations podcast where we chatted all things Irchy Park Canicross, including what makes the event beginner‑friendly and the course a lot of fun! You can listen to the episode here: Episode 191
One of my favourite sections in the park is the last track, the one that brought runners from the final marshal point down towards the meadow at the finish. It was great seeing the dogs and their runners emerge from this track on Sunday morning, putting in a real sprint to reach the finish line.
The treats from Snow Paws went down very well at the finish!
Provisional date for the 2027 event is Sunday, 7th February, so make a note in your diary to come along and join us!