Every Saturday morning at 9am sharp a little bit of anarchy breaks out across the country. This being Britain, it happens, naturally enough, in our parks. It’s meant to be a 5km run, which is why at Richmond Park in south-west London every morning the grass is carpeted with well over 400 people in sports gear. But it has none of the intensity you’d expect at a track or even on a gym treadmill. One woman tugs balloons, to celebrate her 100th run; others prepare to push baby buggies or keep pace with their dogs. Although supported by the charity Parkrun, this and the 559 other events across the UK are entirely self-organised.
Before we understand how this global phenomenon started, some stats for the Richmond Parkrun: there have been a total of 583 runs since the first run took place on 20th October 2007 and the average number of runners per week is 265. There have been a total of 20,620 runners over the 11 year period and the fastest time recorded was by Paul Martelletti with a time of 14:58 for this 5km coarse. The total hours run has been 8years, 11days, 1hr, 59mins and 37secs - a truly amazing statistic in my opinion.
From 13 amateur runners and one park to a community of over 1,000,000 and 559 parks worldwide, all in the space of 10 years. The numbers are impressive, the story behind the numbers is even more remarkable:
Paul Sinton-Hewitt organised the first Parkrun that took place at 8.45am on October 2nd, 2004. 13 amateur runners congregated in Bushy Park in South-West London to start the revolution.
“From day one, I never wanted parkrun to compete with the clubs and I didn’t want it to compete with the races. I just wanted to be a part of the community. My objection to clubs and governing bodies is that they feel they own you and they can direct you to do things, and in fact, that’s not true. People do what they want to do. All we are doing here is building a playground, and if you want to come and take part, you can. People have recognised that it’s free in every sense of the word – it’s not just that you don’t have to pay, but you’re not signing your life away either, there are no terms and conditions, just the same obligations you’d have as a citizen walking down the street.”
“In the beginning I funded everything – I went to work, I took half my salary and I put it into parkrun. In the last ten years parkrun has cost in excess of £3m. We got our first sponsorship in 2009 then in 2010 we partnered with Lucozade and Nike. This is a business in every sense of the word, we employ people, we have obligations, we have costs that are quite large and our websites are as professional as most organisations. We do the best we can to make sure this isn’t Mickey Mouse. Now we have relationships with third parties like PruHealth and we get grants from organisations like the London Marathon – we also have a shop where we’re now trying to sell some stuff, but we try to make sure that all of our commercial activities are as low-key as possible so that they don’t invade the trust runners have in parkrun.”
