#000 / It Starts With Why
Friday the 4th of September, 2026
Welcome to The Participate Playbook, Edition 000.
It Starts With Why
Over the last 25 years I’ve been lucky enough to go along for the ride over a number of incredible sport-related journeys. Not least, my 17 years at parkrun where we went from a few hundred people a week, to a few hundred thousand. 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.
This newsletter’s why is encapsulated perfectly in the preface from Claude Hopkins’ 1927 autobiography, My Life in Advertising, that has stuck with me since I first came across it just the other day (thanks to David Senra’s podcast, Founders):
“Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others, owes a statement to his successors … I set down these findings solely for that purpose of aiding others to start far up the heights that I scaled. Had someone set down a record like this when I began, I would have blessed him for it.”
Nearly a century old, yet it powerfully articulates exactly why I’m doing this.
For at least the first decade at parkrun, things were a real struggle. Day-after-day we found ourselves up against novel challenges. Repeatedly going back to first principle thinking, and finding solutions that so often went against established norms and narratives.
It was challenging, daunting, and often quite lonely.
Of course we were surrounded by many friends and colleagues who wanted us to succeed and would do everything in their power to make that happen, but there was no blueprint, template, or established route. The climb from 400 participants per week in one country, to 400,000 per week across 23 countries was fraught with danger, yet in surviving that journey (just, it was close at times), we became the giant who owed our shoulders to the next generation of community sport leaders.
Over the coming weeks, months, and years, I will attempt to share my own mental archive of the ups, downs, successes, failures, triumphs and tribulations we experienced during my time at parkrun. And I will try my best to do so in a way that you the reader can reflect those tales against your own challenges, in the hope that you will find your own solutions more effectively, efficiently and sustainably than I did.
So I’m writing this to solve a problem I had 15 years ago, and that I know many still have today, to share my experiences, lessons and learnings, so that others can approach their own challenges from further up the mountain.
In full transparency, I should also say that creating content and sharing it with the world is something I get great enjoyment from, so this isn’t entirely altruistic. Whether it was mine and Helen’s Ironman blog (which I can’t believe is still there, 16 years after we stopped writing it), the Marathon Talk Podcast (Martin and I never missed an episode in ten years), or writing to over a million parkrunners, I have always found the practice and discipline required to create something that I was proud of, every single week, to be incredibly fulfilling.
This is as much for me as it is for others.
So, here we are, setting sail on another exciting journey, and I’ll see you on Tuesday at 07:30 BST for the first edition proper of The Participate Playbook.
Thanks for being there,
T
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Tom Williams
Co-Founder, Participate World
participateworld.org
The Participate Playbook newsletter reflects Tom Williams' personal experience and recollections from his time at parkrun. It is not an official parkrun position or record, and any errors are unintentional. Tom writes as an independent consultant through Participate World Limited, and neither he nor the company are affiliated with, employed by, or representatives of parkrun Global or any of its group companies.
Me, Aston, and Rosie setting up Harrogate junior parkrun one Sunday morning.
