On Saturday 5th August 2017 I finally attended my first ever parkrun 🏃♀️
[If this is the first you've heard of parkrun, let me get you up to speed. It's a global movement with events held, for free, every single Saturday - Covid notwithstanding! - in local parks and recreation areas as a way for people to get outside, walk, run or volunteer and connect with their local community. It started in London 17 years ago and has spread to over 20 countries, including my home country, Australia. And yes, parkrun is spelt all one word, all lowercase 😉]
It was January 2017 when someone first told me about parkrun. I was running with friends in Sydney, doing laps across the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge each week and someone mentioned these free, weekly, timed events.
I baulked. Why would I want to run 5km around a park? I already ran in epically beautiful places, whatever distance I wanted. Laps around the same park each week sounded boooring!
Then a few weeks later another running buddy, who was also a parkrun fan, heard about my pushback and suggested that I might like this thing called "parkrun tourism". The idea was to go to parkruns in different locations using it as a way to explore new towns and cities, and even countries ✈️
Immediately I was excited. This sounded so much more fun than returning to the same one park every Saturday morning.
Still, it took me until I was travelling through Queensland more than six months later to finally get to my first parkrun 🤨
I was staying with a friend on the Gold Coast and it turned out there was a parkrun only 10 minutes drive from her house. She turned to me and said, "I'm not coming, I'm staying in bed! But you can have my car..."
And so Varsity Lakes parkrun became my first ever parkrun. I ran this mostly flat 5km in 26:03 and finished tired but happy. First one done ✔️
It turned out that it was a very handy start to the parkrun alphabet that I would later start* deliberately *collecting. But I knew nothing then about the endless number of unofficial parkrun challenges that existed, all I knew was that I'd started something that excited me and I couldn't wait to see where the journey would take me.
My weekends would never be the same again 💛💚💙