Parkrant

Parkrun was my soccer replacement after blowing out my knee. A weekly timed 5K run that promised to be forever free, tracked your statistics for you, and was a worldwide phenomenon, it scratched a lot of my itches, and was this shiny awesome thing. Of course it had to shut down for the pandemic like every other mass gathering, but they soon worked out a system (NotParkrun) whereby you could just do your own socially-distanced run during the week on the honor system and they'd still track it for you.

A lot of the shine has gone off it for me though. Not the running -- I'm still doing NotParkruns more than twice a week on average. Rather, I'm not keen on how both Parkrun and my fellow parkrunners are handling the proposed restart.

It's partly a victim of its own popularity. I hadn't anticipated this happening at all, but for Parkrun to restart, a significant number of parkruns have to restart simultaneously. Why? Because if only a few restart, they will be flooded by parkrunners from neighboring runs that are shut down, creating unsafe conditions. So Parkrun had to get agreements from a lot of landowners, who have responded to the restart plan with varying degrees of enthusiam, for a variety of reasons. This is where Parkrun really seemed to screw up their response: unbelievably, they got pissy with the landowners and invalidated their concerns.

Worse, Parkrun's stance seems to have been restart, restart, restart. While they've been compliant with government mandates, I get the sense that they'd definitely restart if government said it was okay but the scientists said it wasn't. So I'll be having a careful look at things before I ever run one again.

They seem to have worked it out with enough of the landowners now, but a lot of the agreements were contingent on the government proceeding with the last stage of lockdown easing, and that's just been put off until 19 July. So Parkrun has made the announcement that they have to delay the restart, and now it's the other parkrunners that have irked me. They have the same restart, restart, restart mentality, and are claiming the delay has no basis in science (spoiler: it does). They're blaming the landowners as well. There's even a group that are proudly meeting at the usual parkrun time in our local park and running in defiance of the national organisation's request that people not do this. Jerks.

I'll still log my runs, and I'll go back (eventually) if they restart, but I'm really hoping things improve.