Sophie Raworth: my parkrun journey
Parkrun began because a keen runner was injured. This newly acquired bit of knowledge is now making me feel somewhat inadequate after I pulled up injured in the London Marathon. My biggest achievement so far after six weeks of no running has been learning to do chin-ups. I can still only manage one at a time. When Paul Sinton-Hewitt was injured 20 years ago, he on the other hand gathered together 13 friends for a 5km time trial in London’s Bushy Park. It was 4 October, 2004. What neither Paul nor his friends knew then was that their run would start a global movement that would transform millions of people’s lives.
Among the 13 pioneers that day was Karen Weir (above, right), a 31-year-old management consultant in London who, like Paul, was a member of the local Ranelagh Harriers running club. ‘Paul was injured and not really running and missed hanging out with his running friends,’ she tells me. ‘So he said, “Come and run first. I’ll time you all and then we’ll go for coffee.” I think we all just thought it was a one-off.’ Paul was one of the five volunteers that day. Injury meant it would be another 14 weeks before he could actually join them for the first time.
To start with, says Karen, they called it Bushy Park Time Trial. ‘It was just a chance to get better at your running. I was a very, very average club runner. It made me want to be a more competitive runner. But I never imagined I’d end up becoming a running coach.’ Paul kept a record of every run. There were no such things as barcodes in those days. Instead, he had small metal discs made, with numbers stamped on each one. Keeping track of people’s finish times wasn’t too complicated in the early days. Fourteen people turned up on week two, a few dropped out on the Saturday after, then the numbers jumped to 20 on the fourth week. But it was a good six months before 50 people turned up for the first time and a full year before they number hit 100.
As Bushy Park Time Trial grew more popular, Paul and some of his friends decided to take it other parks nearby. Wimbledon launched in 2007, followed by Banstead Woods and then Richmond Park where Karen was put in charge. ‘You were given a laptop by Paul and a set of the metal tokens. People had to register by Friday lunchtime if they wanted to run,’ she says. ‘On Saturday morning we’d bring a picnic table and chair and often an umbrella to stop the laptop getting soaked. There was so much kit,’ she laughs. ‘And I’d sit there come rain or shine and runners would cross the line, give me their token with their finish number and we’d put it straight into the computer database. There were about 50 or so runners. It got complicated with common names. If someone came up and said, “I’m Andrew Brown,” we’d say “Well, which one are you?” So people had to give us a catchphrase or another name. One of our original Richmond runners is known as Andrew Kew Brown, which is where he lives. That way we always knew it was him.’
4 October, 2004, changed Karen’s life. She quit the city, became a running coach and is now a parkrun ambassador, with more than 320 parkruns to her name. ‘It was a serendipitous moment, it really was. We had no idea what it was going to become. I look back and think what a happy accident that I made that decision to go that day.’
Her decision ended up changing my life too. In 2010 I started training with Karen for my first London Marathon and was introduced to parkrun and a whole new world of running friends. These little twists of fate leave me wondering how very different life could have been if Paul Sinton Hewitt hadn’t got injured 20 years ago.
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