Our story
We’re super proud of the fact our volunteer-led, free-for-all 5k and 2k events have been taken up by so many people across so many cultures in so many countries. Of course, it was a bit more low key at the beginning… Our first ever event was in Bushy park, Teddington, UK, where 13 intrepid parkrunners got together on 2 October 2004. The volunteer team included Paul and Joanne Sinton-Hewitt, Duncan Gaskell, Simon Hedger and Robin Drummond. It took nearly two years before parkrun spread beyond Bushy. Wimbledon was the chosen venue and we had to prove to ourselves that we could manage more than a single event at a time. This was the start of the ‘cookie cutter’ approach to events that would allow parkrun to expand. To begin with we collated all results on paper and the finish tokens were washers from the local hardware store! But eventually we ramped up the technology, and so the parkrun registration and barcode result system was born. Now many hundreds of thousands of parkrunners are processed, websites updated and millions of emails sent each week. The parkrun community is growing all the time – but it’s all still based on the simple, basic principles formed from the start: weekly, free, 5k, for everyone, forever.
