Parkrun celebrates 14 years since it began in UK

Saturday marks fourteen years since the first parkrun was started in Bushy Park, London, England, when a former Potchefstroom High School boy, Paul Sinton-Hewitt, invited a few runners to join a timed 5km run in the park.

In those 14 years, half a million different folk have participated at Bushy Park alone.

As I write there are 4,999,390 registered parkrunners across 17 countries. By the time we break for lunch that will hit five million.

So on Saturday across 1,650 different parkruns, 160 odd in South Africa, international parkrun day will be celebrated in colour and in style, thanks to the generosity of 25,000 volunteers giving of their time – mainly with huge smiles on their faces.

When parkrun started there was a handful of hardened runners who arrived. Today, especially in South Africa, there are many thousands of folk who arrive simply to experience the social interaction.

I guarantee that across this magnificent nation, hundreds, possibly thousands of future 10k, half marathon, marathon and indeed Comrades Marathon runners will embark on their first ever 5km run/walk on Saturday.

Thousands more will be happy to stick with parkrun only, and every one of those scenarios are absolutely fine, as long as folk just keep moving.

The Eastern Cape currently has 18 parkruns, with a total registration of nearly 64,000, and 26,000 of those are in Buffalo City. We would have hit 20 by year end but there are no dates available to launch, even though two new events do launch in South Africa every single weekend.

The queue already stretches well into 2019. We have Graaff Reinet, Alice, Gonubie, Addo and Walmer all in line, with many more in the early planning stages.

The tourism value cannot be under estimated, both from a national and an international perspective, and yet it is.

Meanwhile coastal and beach parkruns are continuing to grow, with Melkbosstrand fairly new, Wells Estate in Port Elizabeth on the beach out in the Blue Water Bay area, and Durban Point recently launched.

Sadly Nahoon Point remains inactive although there are new registrations virtually every week.

Over and above Sunrise-on-Sea, Kidd’s Beach, Three Silos and King William’s Town, Buffalo City also has the only alphabetical I in South Africa and the only i in the world, with iMonti parkrun. That in itself is a big tourist attraction.

In early 2019 South Africa will welcome the one millionth registered parkrunner and my hope is that it goes to someone in our city. We were the first outside of the environs of Johannesburg to introduce parkrun, with the fourth and seventh in the country.