On the subject of unhinged parkrun tourism, last summer (I’m sure I screenshotted it but now can’t find it) I saw a post of a woman who hadnt realised the parkrun in Cyprus was on a closed military base, had booked to stay as near to it and found out two weeks before she couldn’t do it and was genuinely considering cancelling her and her families (no one else was a parkrunner) holiday and trying to get a last minute deal somewhere with one…
Batshit.
I like parkrun and like touring and doing lots of different parkruns. I hate “tourists” the same day return flights to Poland, ignoring requests to not go to a parkrun because of one of the dumb ass number sequences. Environmentally horrible and so selfish.
I used to RD and stopped for a number of reasons but people being absolute twats was high up there, I had two worst offender groups.
1) as someone said before, middle aged middle of the pack men. Always rude, never volunteered.
2) also always rude and never volunteer, a particular brand of tourists: slightly larger women in tikiboo skorts, always with camel packs, who take about 45 minutes, always running in a group on a three lapped course which gets narrow and being bloody dickheads about being asked to keep right.We didn’t have toilets at our parkrun, there were some in the park that the council didn’t open till later in the morning made VERY CLEAR in the course description and I had one woman of the above description literally have a tantrum because I couldn’t open it for her.
They were always also the ones who emailed into complain that the barcode scanner wasn’t super cheery, or the marshal was too cheery and it was patronising (both genuine complaints).
argh