In a parallel universe, I do wonder if parkrun is really a weekly-token sorting event, where walkers and runners are simply volunteering to jumble the tokens up and get things going. Last week, for example, parkrun communities sorted over 440,000 little plastic barcodes into order, which is quite an achievement when you think about it! And almost a token-sorting PB, but not quite.

What we’d experienced was an hour or so of the most wonderful socialising, where people from all kinds of backgrounds came together and enjoyed being outdoors, active, and social. It was honestly the most joyful experience, and we all left the park that morning feeling glad to be alive.

So from that point on, I tried my best to not only make time for people, but make the effort to go to them, and carried that through my parkrun leadership journey.

We may often feel too busy, but if we’re looking to achieve the greatest return on investment of our time, then starting with I’ll come to you is about as impactful a strategy as there is.

So much of what you see of parkrun today was developed during the earliest years, where it looked like nothing was happening. In reality however, we were living and breathing free, weekly, timed, 5k-running-events-where-walking-was-welcome, and gradually perfecting our delivery model until such a point where demand would increase and scale would be possible.

This is something that I’ve thought about thousands of times over the last 19 years, it’s something that I’ve changed my opinion on over that time, and it’s something that is probably talked about more than any other parkrun topic.

Over the last 25 years I’ve been lucky enough to go along for the ride over a number of incredible sport-related journeys. And if there’s any one life lesson I’ve learned along the way it’s that together we are so much greater than the sum of our parts, and where people with relevant experience share that with others, incredible things can happen.