VUVUZELAS, cymbals, and even reports of electric guitars... after a week off following our short notice cancellation seven days earlier, parkrun returned with a bang and it was music to everyone's ears.

Situated at the bottom of Cinder Hill, our new in-house band – the Dave Hitchen trio, feat John and Phil – struck up quite a racket to celebrate our return.

While they are unlikely to make an impression on the charts, in at number one over the Leverhulme Park course this week was Thomas Fletcher, followed by Mark Warburton and Byron Edwards (Bury AC).

Liz McLellan (Bolton Metro Tri), Paula Pilling (Burnden Road Runners) and Jackie Price (Astley and Tyldesley Road Runners) were the first three ladies over the line.

Isabella Merritt (77.20 per cent), Liz McLellan (75.63 per cent) and Tony Wall (73.73 per cent) scored the day’s highest age gradings.

There were 257 runners, of whom 38 were first timers, 44 new personal bests were achieved and 20 different athletics clubs were represented.

Amongst the new personal best earners this week, there was Bill Vickers (26mins 35secs), Gareth Doherty (21:42) and Russell Brooks (20:51).

Joshua Lay completed his 10th run to join the junior 10 club while at the other end of the scale Tony Wall, Charles Kattakayam and Kath Vickers completed their 100th parkruns.

With Heaton parkrun cancelled due to another event taking place in their park, a small army of Heatonians made the trip to Bolton in the form of Gary Rostron, Victoria Powell, Byron Edwards, Thomas Hutchinson, Julie Senior, Gabriel and Justin Jones, Zena Knowles, Tom Mitchell, Sarah Oxley, Paul Davenport and Luke Hannon.

There were also visitors from Pennington Flash parkrun (Jackie Price), Woodbank parkrun (Samantha Onslow) and Oldham parkrun (Mark Crossley).

More than 20 people stepped up to volunteer this week and if you would like to help out at a future Bolton parkrun event send an email to BoltonOffice@parkrun.com.

Runner of the week: Helen Harper who put in a new PB time of 24:13, her first PB since June 2013.