The Story Of Parkrun From A To Z
The alphabetical running adventures of Philip Jones
How one man alphabetised his running
A SLENDER WOODEN
bridge spans the River Nogat beneath the towering red-brick walls of Malbork Castle, Poland (Zamek w Malborku in Polish – this is important). At 9am on a Saturday morning in February, Philip Jones found himself standing next to it. The only foreigner present, he shook hands with the local runners who had gathered by the ‘Start’ sign. There were eight participants, so Philip took comfort from the fact that things would have to go very badly for him to miss out on a top-10 finish.
Then they were off: along the reedy bank, past something called ‘Jumpy Park’, round a marshal, through the cones where they’d started, along to a river beach, then another 180-degree turn and a final 1,500 metres to the finish. Philip’s barcode was scanned, his token collected. There were sombre handshakes and a few photographs. By 9:30am, the riverbank was empty once more. Philip wandered back to his hotel, content in the knowledge he had just become a parkrun ‘alphabeteer’.
A year or so earlier, when he was sitting in a pub nursing a pint of his favourite postrun recovery drink, somebody had happened to mention ‘the parkrun alphabet.’ His next three questions were, as he later discovered, the ones everybody asks. Do you have to do the parkruns in alphabetical order? (No.) Where do you find a parkrun beginning with ‘X’? (You don’t; currently, no such run exists.) Finally, why? (Why not?)
‘At the time, I couldn’t imagine being drawn into an activity that seemed so pointless and random,’ he says. ‘It appeared to be a lot of effort expended to very little purpose. It was a bit nerdy, an anorak pursuit; like trainspotting, only with your feet.’
But somewhere along the way,
Philip changed his mind. He’d already done parkruns in about six different places and says he started to enjoy turning up in odd locations on a Saturday morning and plugging into a community with its own rituals and idiosyncrasies. ‘I began to find myself in places that I had only previously encountered on road signs, maps or news reports of stabbings.’
At first, he travelled just a bit further than his local parkrun, in Horton Park, Bradford. ‘Most addictions start in a small way,’ he says. But before long, he had announced his plan to complete the alphabet challenge. ‘Having gone public, there was no turning back and the project gained its own momentum,’ he says. A year or so on, he was so hooked that he had travelled to Poland specifically to nab the elusive ‘Z’ that belonged to Zamek w Malborku.
On his runs through letter-land, he discovered some interesting places, met all kinds of people and had a few unexpected adventures. ‘Queen Elizabeth Country Park is more like a trail run and took me to the heart of the South Downs. Newbury uses the runway of the old United States Air Force base at Greenham Common. Pontefract and York go round courses designed for quadrupeds. Mole Valley winds through vines at the Denbies Winery on the slopes of Box Hill.’
LOVING THE UNEXPECTED
But the real delight, he says, was in not knowing what to expect and being a tourist in locations that would normally fail to feature as tourist sites. There were random water meadows, cycle tracks, housing estates, scraps of space that have become places where parkruns take place at 9am every Saturday, with people congregating to enjoy themselves by running in circles.
‘Without parkrun, I would never have become a tourist in Kesgrave, Chadderton or Goole, or even had a clue where Jersey Farm is located.’ [In case you’re interested, it’s tucked away beyond St Albans, Hertfordshire.]
The people he encountered included a lot of fellow parkrun tourists, happy to talk about their experiences and plans. Many were pursuing their own arcane goals: to visit all the parkruns with watery names, or that were animal-related, or referred to body parts…the list is almost endless.
Some fellow tourists were met online, because, as with any addiction, there are support groups available. Through them, new lexicons of jargon were opened up: there are acronyms such as NENDY – Nearest Event Not Done Yet; you might quickly find
Copyright ©FreeVectorMa ps.com yourself referring to a ‘Tourist Streak’ (which isn’t as risqué as it sounds); you might become fascinated by your P-Index, or your Wilson Index (don’t even ask – you can find out more on apps such as ‘Running Achievements’).
The main tourist group on Facebook is ‘UK parkrun tourists’, which is described as ‘a special interest group for parkrunners who have run at
20 or more different 5K parkruns’.
This is a closed group with just under 7,000 members. They can be spotted at most parkruns because they tend to sport the Cow Cowl – a piece of multifunctional headgear in yellow, white and black, and emblazoned with cows.
The bovine logo is a tribute to the original über-tourist, Chris Cowell. As early as August 2012, he had taken part in parkruns at 100 venues. This was especially impressive because, at the time, there were only 136 in the UK. That number has grown to more than 1,000, not to mention the events in 19 other countries. Care to try them all?