Colchester runner dominates the running community with fun animal-shaped routes to challenge the members. 

Nick Oakley, a 64-year-old wine merchant and a runner from Colchester has started creating artistically shaped running trails and sharing them with the Running Colchester community where he's an admin, to give members possible fun challenges to undergo. 

Nick started creating the routes four years ago after his daughters gifted him a GPS watch for Christmas and on Boxing day his daughter, Josephine Oakley and he went for a run alongside the riverside through Castle Park. 

After they looked at the app, it resembled an elephant without legs and moving forward Nick started adding more to make the elephant look like a real thing.

Nick said: "We've refined the route to make it look like an elephant and it seemed appropriate as the elephant is the symbol of Colchester and the Zoo, and we have a Jumbo monument - It was meant to be!

"I posted the resulting elephant route picture on our Running Colchester facebook page suggesting we ran it the next day, 28th December. We got more than 50 runners. 

"So the real inventor of the course, or the one that noticed it first was Joey. A joint effort."

Nick has also created more routes, like a dolphin trail, which he explained: "I tried to create a park run flat course at the Castle Park as all the ones we have are going through the hill.

"When I completed it and looked back at it in the app it looked a bit like a dolphin and coming very shortly after the Elephant route, people thought I was a deliberate creator of animal routes.

"Truth is both had been coincidental, but I got requests for other animal routes, and I still get tagged by running friends when there is some outrageous animal-shaped route on Facebook."

Nick's eldest daughter has also come up with a route, this time resembling a penguin. 

The creator, Charlotte Oakley decided to create a more difficult one resulting in a 10km trail which was used once by St Helena's Hospice for a fundraiser.