Parkrunners, assemble!

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NotGonnaLieToYou said:
Does anyone know of a parkrun which has moved location? Ie they are still in the same town but moved to a new area and course?
(Doing a bit of research for an event director who is considering moving an event to a different location but in the same area)
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Bois de Boulogne Paris moved to a different part of the woods. We did an in depth survey before changing the route.

Then parkrun UK closed down all French parkruns.
 
NotGonnaLieToYou said:
Does anyone know of a parkrun which has moved location? Ie they are still in the same town but moved to a new area and course?
(Doing a bit of research for an event director who is considering moving an event to a different location but in the same area)
Click to expand...
There has been a few near me that moved location but kept the same core team. Tees barrage moved to Wynyard Woodland, Gibside moved to Chopwell Wood. Catterick moved to Thorp Perrow. Seems to be quite difficult for the teams to find a nearby suitable location once they've lost permission, so they can end up a few miles away.
 
Millennial Pink said:
There has been a few near me that moved location but kept the same core team. Tees barrage moved to Wynyard Woodland, Gibside moved to Chopwell Wood. Catterick moved to Thorp Perrow. Seems to be quite difficult for the teams to find a nearby suitable location once they've lost permission, so they can end up a few miles away.
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I’m waiting for Durham to move tbh. The university has already had it move around the track 🙄.
 
NotGonnaLieToYou said:
Does anyone know of a parkrun which has moved location? Ie they are still in the same town but moved to a new area and course?
(Doing a bit of research for an event director who is considering moving an event to a different location but in the same area)
Click to expand...

Our local Parkrun moved , apparently it was because of Parkrunners misusing the toilets in the cafe at the start/finish. When I say misusing I mean not leaving them in a very good condition 😬 Not sure if this is true. The finish has been moved to a leisure centre carpark.
 
Parkrun removing the course records etc has caused a huge stir in Australia. A lot of people don’t realise that they rely heavily on UK funding and that the initial report findings indicated that their funding should be withdrawn if they didn’t do something
 
chickhicks86 said:
I'm just trying to figure out how a course record being published would put someone off coming to parkrun? Is that the main motivation around doing it? As a sport, I do find running quite inclusive, not just parkrun. The fast times are inspirational!
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Agree, I will never run a course record but i love seeing how quick people can! It’s incredible, and it’s not like these people turn up at run a 15 minute parkrun with no training, they’re usually elite athletes who train incredibly hard. Are we going to stop broadcasting the Olympics incase it puts people off doing sport?
 
chickhicks86 said:
I'm just trying to figure out how a course record being published would put someone off coming to parkrun? Is that the main motivation around doing it? As a sport, I do find running quite inclusive, not just parkrun. The fast times are inspirational!
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The headline about being less "off putting" is clearly a mirage, they're removing the records because of their decision to allow trans women to participate in the female category.

parkrun initially marketed itself as being a low-stakes, low pressure, running activity that wasn't about competition. When I first started going to parkrun, it was always a "it doesn't matter how slow you are" attitude, but because it was still timed the competitive side will inevitably come out and it has. I don't run anymore but the published times wouldn't put me off, what does is the fact that it has grown away from the supportive environment it touts to be (in my experience) and there is a lot of self-righteousness floating around now. As I said, they're doing this to avoid the criticism over trans runners.
 
I've been that person who's been self conscious of my running ability, I used to look at the previous year's race results to see would be last if I ran and I've chosen not to run races because I had visions of being miles behind everyone else, convinced they would forget I was still out on the course and pack up to go home! Silly I know but genuinely that was my thought process. Even when I started parkrun many years ago I was sometimes mindful of being "one of the last" - this was before tail walker was mandatory. And parkrun have addressed this since by introducing the tail walker and park walker roles.
Parkrun can't be everything to everyone. Things like first finishers, course records, age grading - meant nothing to me when I started out in parkrun, and still don't interest me that much. But they are important to some people. I actually find the first finisher's page interesting at times - sometimes we have father/ daughter or mother/son first finishers or first finishers who are a couple.
 
NotGonnaLieToYou said:
I've been that person who's been self conscious of my running ability, I used to look at the previous year's race results to see would be last if I ran and I've chosen not to run races because I had visions of being miles behind everyone else, convinced they would forget I was still out on the course and pack up to go home! Silly I know but genuinely that was my thought process. Even when I started parkrun many years ago I was sometimes mindful of being "one of the last" - this was before tail walker was mandatory. And parkrun have addressed this since by introducing the tail walker and park walker roles.
Parkrun can't be everything to everyone. Things like first finishers, course records, age grading - meant nothing to me when I started out in parkrun, and still don't interest me that much. But they are important to some people. I actually find the first finisher's page interesting at times - sometimes we have father/ daughter or mother/son first finishers or first finishers who are a couple.
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Yeah! I’ve done exactly the same with races to check if I’ll be last! But like you said it doesn’t mean we think that fast runners shouldn’t be shown, it just means there’s more need for more of us slow runners!
 
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