Team Spirit

With Chris Lomax MBE currently championing community sport over at the Doha Forum, this week I’m sat on my own here in Participate World Towers, reflecting on another great week, and looking toward 2026 and beyond.

I’ve increasingly come to the conclusion that for me to feel really fulfilled I need to be part of a brilliant team of people. Looking back at my time at parkrun, I was lucky enough to lead our operations team for over a decade, during which time we enabled and supported the delivery of something like 650,000 events and 100m instances of participation.

It was the most incredible journey, packed full of challenges we could never have imagined, and yet throughout that time I don’t think we ever had a major fall-out. We also had a close-to-zero staff turnover, and despite hugely differing personalities, skill sets, and backgrounds, which of course led to completely different views across many topics, we never failed to find common ground and move forward with consensus. In some ways I think we took that magical time for granted, and considered our situation to be the norm, when in fact that’s far from the case.

In the future I’d like to write more about that brilliant group of people and the experiences we shared … whether it was navigating through the crazy COVID era, dealing with parish councils who wanted to charge everyone a quid, rolling out AEDs across over 2,000 events (by the time I left, parkrun defibs had saved over 100 lives), dealing with mind-blowingly complex safeguarding issues, processing hundreds of thousands of results a week, or supporting tens of thousands of weekly volunteers, not to mention the million other crazy edge cases we encountered along the way … we always found a way to do the right thing, together.

For all of us, of course, it was never really a job … rather, it was a moment in our lives, where we all realised that we were fortunate enough to be in a position where our day-to-day work led directly to positive impact on millions of peoples lives, all around the world.

And that’s something I feel incredibly lucky to have been a part of and proud to have contributed to.

The team spirit, collective responsibility, and shared victories, is also something I’d like to recreate at Participate World.

Finally, talking of that incredible team, today’s photo is the incomparable Bruce Fordyce (left, next to my Dad), who I met through parkrun and am now lucky enough to call a true friend. Bruce is one of those rare people who understands both super elite sporting performance (look him up) and true grass roots community sport and physical activity (as Gill Fordyce’s trusty assistant he’s been pivotal in taking parkrun across Southern Africa). He was 70 this week and on Saturday will complete his 600th parkrun!

Happy Birthday Bruce.

Here’s to the future x