The genius of Parkrun

Photo some rights reserved by Darren Foreman.

We’ve been told we need to exercise more for years now, but finally it seems to be sinking in. While the stats for the proportion of people who are overweight or obese are still awful and the number of people who get little to no regular exercise are nothing to be proud about, there are more and more organisations catering to growing demand for physical activity.

Alongside teams we’ve worked with at BGV like GoodGym, Run an Empire and The Hard Yard, my favourite example is Parkrun. It’s been going since 2004 but has really started ramping up in the last few years and now operates in 15 countries with over a hundred thousand people all running a timed 5km on a Saturday morning just for fun.

To begin with we collated all results on paper and the finish tokens were washers from the local hardware store! But eventually we ramped up the technology, and so the parkrun registration and barcode result system was born.

It is a genius system — so simple but effective, which could be said of the design of the organisation as a whole. It’s completely reliant on volunteers and every Parkrun around the world has the same basic pattern. This leads to Parkrun tourism with people racing to see how many different runs they can do. I’ve got my eye on the busiest Parkrun in the world which is in North Beach in Durban, South Africa where they had over 2,000 runners last weekend.

I love going along to my local event in Mile End Park in London. There were over 400 people there this weekend and I don’t think that was just because the IAAF World Athletics Championships were taking place round the corner. There’s plenty of room to grow and I think we’ll see more and more organisations catering for the demand from people to get more active.

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