Glad Parkrun are finally driving the elitism out of Parkrun

If "elitism" bothers people, just get faster lol

It started in the UK as a free weekly timed 5 k. It's now in many other countries, including the US, Australia, Japan, Italy and others. The Athlete Special has "won" a parkrun in the US and made a YouTube video about it although parkrun is officially not a race. It became a nonprofit charity in 2018 and has a turnover of ten million pounds. Since some female records in the UK have fallen to trans runners, headquarters has decided to scale back the competitive aspect of parkrun by not publishing records, stating that records intimidate and scare off new runners.

Important post well articulated 👍

As an American, it was really cool to travel abroad and have a free race in every town, on every Saturday. As much as casuals want to go on and on about how it’s not a race it’s a run, the opportunity was there for it to be a race for those who wanted to treat it that way. It’s really sad to see that aspect get taken away, no matter what the reason is. I am actually sad about this. Parkrun was special.

As an American, I am sad about this as well.

Dunno if it's reliable but some stats are here statsmeifyoucan dot github dot io

The nearest one to me is two plus hours away. It's not a big thing in America.

What a great story.

parkrun events require land owner (local government in most cases) approval to operate and will only enter into an agreement for the use of the area at no cost. Any other activity (running club for example) that approached a land owner with the intention of hosting an organised event would be expected to apply for and pay for a permit to hold the event.

It makes no difference to costs whether parkrun is considered a run or a race. parkrun applies that no-cost policy across the board. It's a free, weekly event and as long as it remains "timed" people will go because ultimately whilst there are people that are unhappy with the removal of certain statistics (myself included) most people don't care enough about these stats to change their weekly, 5k routine.

The website fastrunning seems to have closed this week at same time as parkrun Top 10, became no longer a thing. is this permanent?

I just read something where some recreational parkrunners met the parkrun CEO to 'discuss' the ending of its stats. He came over as a guy with minimal interest in sport so it's maybe just as well that he's taken the agency away from the world of sport.

Well this sucks. My son is getting into running and is really happy with his times. We wanted to see what the age group records were for our local parkrun, to potentially give him a little motivation/inspiration in the future, but this information is no longer available.

I'm sure the data was a tremendous motivator for many people in all age groups. I know it was for me. How could any sane mind possibly conclude that the good outweighed the bad when it came to removing these stats?