The phenomenon that is parkrun
It is 20 years since Paul Sinton-Hewitt set up a running event in Bushy Park, Teddington. Starting with 13 runners, parkrun now has more than 2,200 events in more than 20 countries. He talked to Pippa Duncan about his running legacy that focuses on health and wellbeing rather than a fastest time
Although a runner for years, I didn’t want to do parkrun simply because I liked my Saturday morning lie ins. Who wants to be in Richmond Park for a 9am start with a few hundred other people, to run up and down hills? Well, it turns out I did.
The 5K parkrun is an integral part of many people’s week. For some, it’s a chance to beat their fastest time, but for many it is more of a social event: to meet friends and run, walk or maybe do a bit of both – just get around the course and always end up feeling better about yourself. You have achieved something.
Paul Sinton-Hewitt, founder of parkrun, says he started the running event purely for selfish reasons: ‘It was a project for myself. It wasn’t strategic, it was about my own wellbeing and seeing people every week.’ It started with just 13 runners in Bushy Park in 2004. And then people just joined in, week after week, and the numbers grew. He was persuaded in 2007 to open more groups – Wimbledon, Banstead Woods and Richmond Park were next. And it carried on growing.
‘Right from the word go we had families and children attending. It became very clear that it was much more than a running event, it was an event where families came together and communities were formed. It brings people together.
‘In Northern Ireland, the Catholics ran on one side of the park and the Protestants on the other. They were fenced off from each other. Now those communities are fully integrated and the fences have come down.’ The same happened in South Africa, bringing disparate runners together and gaining a wider positive impact for the locals in those areas. After spreading across the UK, parkrun was launched in Denmark in 2009, followed by other countries such as Austraila, US, Poland, Russian, Japan and Malaysia.
For those who’ve never done a parkun, all runners start together, the fastest at the front and those running with pushchairs or dogs on leads, at the back and the rest of us somewhere in the middle. Richmond Park usually has 400-500 runners each week. At the time of writing, the fastest runner this week was in at 17:10 and the slowest at 55:39 (although many are a lot slower than this!). The Richmond Park parkun is challenging – there are two hills and an incline up to Sheen Gate that seems to go on forever, but others like Old Deer Park or Wimbledon Common are much flatter. At the end of course you are handed a token which clocks your time against your own parkrun number. Just register online before your first run to get your unique code and show it along with your token at the end. You’ll be informed by email of your timing and stats and details will also be on their website.
Georgia Bell, who was raised in Chiswick, had retired from a career in running, but just a couple of years ago she went to the local parkrun, which re-ignited her love for the sport. She came back from Paris with a Bronze medal.
In 2015, it became Sinton-Hewitt’s mission to make the world a happier and healthier place through parkun and it then became a charity. Whilst he’s happy he has built a legacy, he still has mixed feelings: ‘One of the nice things in the early days was that I did what thought was right. I didn’t have to check with everyone. If it made sense for me, from a moral point of view, I did it. Now if we want to expand into a new country there are 100 people who want to have their say about it.’ But the positive side is that there are more structures in place and it can continue to grow.
He now has arthritis in his left leg, so his parkruns are limited to a few year, but Sinton-Hewitt is still at events most weeks, volunteering. Every event is free, which means it is run purely by volunteers on the ground – often those who can’t run for whatever reason that week, or by locals just happy to help. And that is the joy of parkrun – it is a community event, a social movement. As Sinton-Hewitt says, ‘There are no rules about how you should look or what kind person should be. It’s for everyone.’
‘No rules about how you should look or what kind person you should be – it’s for everyone.’ Parkrun has never been just about the running.
Why parkrun?
Fun – Free – Inclusive – Open to all ages – Community minded – Reduces isolation – Gives you a sense of achievement
parkrun.org.uk
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