A local park was an unlikely place you could expect to find me at 9am on a Saturday, but I soon learnt it was a place of almost pilgrimage for people in my community taking part in a Parkrun.
As someone who has dipped in and out of their own running journey and runs a mere 5k to simply keep fit, I always put off attending any official running event. I soon learned that while for me this was just something I’d signed up to for the sake of a gossip with friends, for some, it was a part of their weekly ritual.
And, for others, it was quite simply a ‘walk in the park’ as they raced around the route in no time, having established themselves already in the running community as ‘top dogs’. It’s safe to say I had no idea of the sheer scale that parkrun had, even in a small city like Derby, in a modest park that hadn’t seen me run since my days playing football as a kid.
I was shocked at the sheer number of people ready to run at such early doors on what was a pretty cold and miserable October morning – 275 to be exact. That, I suppose, is what makes Parkrun so appealing for everyday people: an event that welcomes anyone, in the outdoors, with a strong sense of community and all completely for free.
Parkrun is a 5k that takes place every Saturday morning in numerous parks across towns and cities in the UK. The organisation has grown, welcoming anyone and everyone to partake, with no time limits.
As I hastily gathered around the starting line, I could spot all kinds of people – from parents with pushchairs to those running alongside their dogs, children, pensioners and, of course, the ones I was most fearful of – the long-time marathon-competing runners keen to get a good time.
I had always been nervous to sign up for Parkrun, thinking that it would be pretentious and full of ultramarathon runners trying to get an ego boost.
Although, it was far from this – instead it was an event for all of the people sitting somewhere in between, reigning true to their motto: ‘It’s not a race; it’s a run.’ At around each km of the run itself, I was faced with volunteers, carefully placed there to guide runners along the route and cheer you on for a bit of a moral boost. If only I could bring these people with me on every run to tell me to keep going after the first 3km.
On the way around the route, complete strangers running past would egg me and my friends on with their words of encouragement – typically these were confident ‘come on’s’ or ‘keep going, girls’.
At first I thought this was sweet, but after the third incident I started to question how badly I must be doing to seem to need so much encouragement.
Mostly, I was shocked to see that week in, week out, they were able to garner enough volunteers to manage the event, hand out each individual’s barcodes to track their times, and keep people on the right track. It was a friendly reminder to me that there is still a strong sense of community out there, in and around our towns and cities, that maybe I had been ignorant of before.
With the constant pressures to join the gym or try a craze diet or new ‘miracle’ product to be healthy, Parkrun felt like the antidote to all of that. It continues to help people keep fit the good old-fashioned way – outside, for free and with a community surrounding you each step of the way.