ATHLETICS
Come to celebrate Sunrise parkrun
ON the 5th January 2013 Bruce Fordyce, Comrades king and CEO of Parkrun South Africa came to East London to see his parkrun dream grow to a seventh event with the launch of the Sunrise-on-Sea parkrun.
Nahoon Point had been launched just five months earlier and East London now had two of the seven events in South Africa, the other five all being Gauteng based. How that has all changed, with 94 parkruns on the calendar and spread all over the land.
This weekend Sunrise celebrates its fourth anniversary and will be expecting a record turnout.
As always the event starts from and finishes on the premises of Murambi Cafe at 8am and traverses a 5km route through the farmlands.
As is the case with most parkruns the route evolves and Sunrise is no different, having recently changed to a course that many believe is the perfect parkrun.
Tourists come from all over the world to run in the Eastern Cape and last weekend was no different, with two runners from the United Kingdom, Davis Venter and Ingrid Wagner running three parkruns in two days (New Year’s day offered a double header) and reaching 313 and 315 parkruns respectively. They have done all but King William’s Town in this region and they will be there today, bringing their total to around 87 different parkruns internationally. Their home run is at Kingston Park in London.
Sunrise has a number of its own celebrities, inclusive of event director Danie Bessinger and his team of volunteers.
Over and above that they have Tiamari Taljaard, who has run 212 parkruns on consecutive weeks, with 208 being completed at Sunrise, two at Root 44 in Stellenbosch, one at Nahoon Point and one at Three Silos. A non-runner before the advent of parkruns she ventured out for the first time to walk the recce run to the launch. No other parkrunner in South Africa, we think the world, has accomplished this.
There have now been 211 events at Sunrise, with a total distance of 138 775km travelled for 27 755 individual runs shared between 3 987 different parkrunners. The total time spent on the route has been two years, 94 days, four hours, seven minutes and 52 seconds.
On 4 598 occasions a runner or walker has recorded a personal best time.
The fastest man to date has been Edumisa Mtoli, who ran 18:18, while Hanlie Botha holds the women’s record with a time of 19:13.
The parkrun is not purely about time, however. It is about community, health and family. Tomorrow at 8am there will be much celebration inclusive of cake, a parkrun tradition.
As always it is free and all one needs to run is a barcode which can be registered for on www.parkrun.co.za