Twenty years ago, on a windy autumnal Saturday morning, thirteen runners descended on a park in south-west London for an event called the Bushy Park Time Trial. A 5km course was set out and the organiser, Paul Sinton-Hewitt, a computer programmer who grew up in South Africa, bought rings from a hardware store to hand out as finish tokens. The times were listened to afterwards on a laptop in a local Caffè Nero.
This Saturday the weather had not improved much – cloudy and the sun doing its best to peek through – and the location was the same: the picturesque Bushy Park with the resident red deer standing upright, ready to rut. But almost everything else about the impromptu get-together has evolved. It has been called that since 2008 Parkrun and there are now 2,500 weekly events – all 3 miles long, all free – in 22 countries, everywhere from the slopes of Etna to 25 British prisons and the Falkland Islands. In a normal week about 350,000 people will participate. Runner’s world calls it a “global phenomenon”.
Just under 2,000 people turned up in Bushy Park for this weekend’s anniversary. Parkrun’s regular roll call includes Olympians and a 100-year-old man in New Zealand who achieved over 175, and everyone in between. On Saturday, Paralympic swimmer Ellie Simmonds volunteered at Bushy Park and among the runners was Richard Fletcher, a local runner who did his first in January 2006 and completed his 800th event on Saturday.
“Once you start, once you’re addicted, it’s like a drug, you can’t stop,” Fletcher says with a big grin, after crossing the line. “Every Saturday at 9am, wherever I am in the world, I’m going to try to do a Parkrun. I did one in Krakow. I was in Helsinki, I did one there. I was in Namibia in Swakopmund last year and I just showed up, and the guys were fantastic. We start, we end, and at the end we all have a little banter. It’s a great sense of community.”
Sinton-Hewitt, 64, who was awarded a CBE in 2014, was also back at Bushy Park on Saturday but did not run (he has arthritis in his left knee). As well as the physical benefits of walking or running 5km a week, he believes the reason parkrun appeals to so many people is the boost it gives to mental health.
“I’ve always suffered from mood swings,” he says, “and I knew I had to run mentally to keep the boat afloat. So I thought the best thing I could do was start this event and see my friends every weekend. And ten years later it was clear that it had been my secret weapon, my little pill that I took every weekend that helped. It hasn’t helped me because I still have flaws, but it has helped deal with the ups and downs.”
Recent research from Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield appears to reinforce Sinton-Hewitt’s position. The six-month study, which looked at 548 newly registered Parkrunners and used the UK Office for National Statistics to measure wellbeing, found that life satisfaction increased after just two Parkruns. “During Covid, life satisfaction among the UK population fell by 0.4 based on the ONS data,” said Professor Steve Haake from Sheffield Hallam University’s Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre. “And after Parkrun, life satisfaction increased by 0.25. So that gives me a sense of how powerful something like Parkrun is.
“I work mainly in public health,” Haake continues, “and I can’t think of any public health initiative in Britain as big as parkrun.”
Parkrun, which became a charity in 2017, has not been able to completely avoid controversy in its two decades. There were complaints earlier this year – and some calls for Sport England to withdraw its funding – about trans women being allowed to identify as women. (If runners register and do not wish to state their gender, they can indicate “another gender identity” or “I prefer not to say.”)
Parkrun has also removed a number of speed records from its website to avoid being “offensive” for new participants.
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But overwhelmingly, regulars love parkrun and see its ethos: free; open to everyone; an event, not a race – as something rare and worth cherishing.
As the prosecco flowed modestly in Bushy Park, Sinton-Hewitt looked to the future. “I live with it every day, so the new milestones are not a big shock,” he says.
“It’s just a miracle where we will be in twenty years. We’re only going to get bigger.
“So we have 10 million registered people now – will that be 15 million in 20 years? Or 100 million?”