How a 'selfish motive' sparked the global Parkrun running phenomenon
The founder of the free Saturday 5km is gearing up for a major Aussie expansion, with cancer patients such as Richard Scolyer, weekend walkers and thousands of regulars swearing by its life-changing impact.
Parkrun founder Paul Sinton-Hewitt has an ambitious plan to take the free weekly 5km event to even more “far-flung places,” adding to the more than 500 runs already held across Australia every weekend.
The 65-year-old Brit is the brains behind parkrun, which began with just 13 entrants on a Saturday morning in 2004 at Bushy Park in southwest London.
It has since expanded at a rate never dreamt of, now hosted in thousands of locations worldwide with 500,000 participants every week.
Mr Sinton-Hewitt still pinches himself as he tries to grasp just how enormous the timed weekly events – that can be run or walked – have become.
“When I take a look at it now I think, ‘oh my god, how did this happen?’,” he told this masthead who spoke to him at parkrun’s London headquarters.
“Yes I’m the one that created it and made it happen, but truthfully, it would have never happened if the product wasn’t good”.
Parkrun is a free, weekly, timed 5km running event that is held in more than 3500 locations worldwide, having spread from the UK to 23 countries.
More than 500 Parkrun locations are scattered across Australia in every state and territory.
They are held every Saturday morning, with start times varying between 7am or 8am, depending on the location.
To date, more than 100,000 individual volunteers have helped make the events happen.
Among the tens of thousands of weekly Australian participants is former Australian of the Year, Professor Richard Scolyer, 58.
In June, he completed his 250th parkrun – a milestone he set two years ago after he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
Shortly after reaching the milestone, he posted on Instagram about the importance of the events to his health and wellbeing.
“Parkrun is such an important staple in my week and a fantastic, volunteer-run organisation who make it easy and accessible for anyone to get out and about and join the community,” he wrote on Instagram.
Mr Sinton-Hewitt says parkrun has the perfect ingredients that turned a small run through London park into a worldwide running phenomenon.
“The reason I think it’s successful is it’s free, it’s weekly, it’s for everybody and the fact that it’s run by volunteers who are doing something for their community,” he said.
“It was a very simple, selfish motive on my part, I was struggling with my physical fitness, I’d been injured, I was going through a relationship change, so (I was) struggling really with life and on a downward spiral.
“The thing that I knew that I could improve was to get to see my friends.
“I decided the best thing I could do was to create my own little gathering and so that was the first one in October 2004”.
To date, Mr Sinton-Hewitt has completed nearly 600 parkruns and volunteered about 300 times. He names the Newcastle Parkrun as his favourite down under.
“Australia (is) a unique country with lots of wide open spaces and big distances between towns and villages,” he said.
“We’ve implemented parkrun in the places that absolutely makes the most sense, what I think the Australian team is focused on (now) is health and wellbeing, so they are doing more difficult things, the things that cost us much more”.
This includes setting up parkruns in locations including prisons, allowing inmates to participate.
Participants can run or walk the event as fast or slow as they wish. Their times are recorded after scanning their individual barcodes – obtained upon registering – and are emailed to them shortly after completion.
Entrants who reach the key 25, 50, 100, 250 or 500 parkruns receive a commemorative t-shirt.
Volunteers receive the same reward once they hit milestones starting from 25 upwards – a clear motivator to keep people rolling up every week.
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Originally published as How a 'selfish motive' sparked the global Parkrun running phenomenon
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