Everyone’s a winner at Parkrun

Richard Askwith salutes the octogenarians (and over) still embracing the five-kilometre challenge with gusto

It’s an overcast Saturday morning in September and the world’s most famous parkrun is about to begin. Runners of many shapes and sizes have assembled at Parkrun’s birthplace in Bushy Park and there’s the usual hint of anticipatory tension. In the Diana Fountain car park, however, the mood is one of uninhibited hilarity. At least it is if you’re anywhere near the bit of cardboard on a stick reading ‘80 AND OVER MEET HERE’ (right).

A few yards beyond, octogenarians are milling and bantering like over-excited children.

‘Are you sure you’re 80? You don’t look it’, says George Frogley, greeting yet another grizzled new arrival.

Frogley, who is chronologically 86 but looks a robust 60 insists he is not the instigator of the gathering. He blames it instead on Richard Pitcairn Knowles, 87, a retired osteopath from Sevenoaks.

‘It started a few years ago,’ explains Frogley. ‘Richard said, “Come along for a jog and it grew from there. In 2017, they persuaded 18 over-80s to join them. By 2019, before Covid snuffed out the momentum, they had reached 48.’

Everyone is welcome at a parkrun event: old and young, experienced or not; the slow, the sedentary and the shy, just as much as the focused chasers of records and personal bests. It isn’t a race; there is no right or wrong speed to run at; anyone who finishes is a winner.

That’s why, in this throng, a few dozen octogenarians shuffling along are barely conspicuous.

Who could have predicted back in 2004, that the Bushy Park TimeTrial, as it was initially called, would take root, grow, flourish and self-replicate into the Western world’s fastest growing massparticipation sporting movement?

Who could have imagined such a transformative and life-enhancing institution being created by a man,

Willing in spirit: over-80s assemble for the Bushy Park annual Time -Trial event Paul Sinton-Hewitt, whose life in 2004 seemed defined by mid-life failure? He’d been sacked from his job, dumped by his girlfriend, sidelined from running by a brokendown body.

His subsequent struggles with depression led to a breakdown. And yet, at his lowest adult moment, he turned his back on despair and did something positive. The fivekilometre time trial he organised for his friends became a weekly fixture and a template that caught on globally, for millions of people.

This phenomenon is now so well-established – with seven million people registered to take part in parkrun events in 23 countries, and around 350,000 actually doing so each week (140,000 if them in Britain) – that it all seems as natural, permanent and inevitable as the avenues of old oaks, limes and horse-chestnuts that line our route.

We pause too rarely to marvel at such benign creations as parks or parkrun, or to give thanks for them.

But today the air is vibrant with gratitude, especially as the octogenerians, singly and in clusters, eventually arrive at the finish.

Several are visibly struggling to keep going to the end. A casual observer might flinch at the sight of so many dusty, heavy-footed, worn-out old people.

It is the precise opposite of shiny, Instagram-ready, youthful perfection. But it is also the precise opposite of defeat, because, in each straining gait, you can discern the vigour of the soul within. On each of those weary faces, you can see the most triumphant of smiles.

Grubby, sweat-stained and radiant, the octogenarians potter and mingle near the finish. Some have run astonishingly fast. Graeme Baker from Teignbridge Trotters was fastest of all, completing the 5km course in a fraction over 28 minutes.

John Holland from Chelmsford and Amos Seddon from Harwich were about half-a-minute behind, with Dennis Carter and Eva Osborne, both from Wymondham, also breaking half and hour. Eva’s time is a new age group record, as is the 31:08 recorded by 85-year old Tom Harrison from Reading.

None of the runners seem drained by the experiences. Instead, they clap energetically as the oldies continue to arrive. Yogi Allen, a snowy-haired Hash House Harrier from East Grinstead, cruises in at a patient floating plod. Subsequent finishers drag their feet but bubble with high spirits nonetheless.

Some are tall; some short; some thin; some fat. But they all share smiles of childish delight.

The two 90-year-olds – Dermot Lynch, a Bushy Park regular, and Geoff Jackson, who has come up from Didcot – both record times in the low 50s. But the happiest finisher may be 89-year-old Albert Yee (grandfather of Olympic silver medallist triathlete Alex Yee), who plods home proudly with his walking poles in well over an hour. This is nearly half-an hour slower than his previous attempt, two years earlier.

He explains afterwards, ‘I had an operation. So I’m back to square one.’ Today, he is at square two.

Meanwhile, beaming, headbanded Geoff Jackson who usually offers post-run cakes to fellow parkrunners in Didcot, declares to anyone who will listen, ‘I just can’t stop running’.

Hilary Bradt, a girlish-looking 80, takes a more measured view. ‘I keep going,’ she explains, ‘because I know that if I stop, it will be the end’.

Bradt is a hiker at heart rather than an athlete, with a lifelong enthusiasm for backpacking. It not only strengthened her knees for life (she believes) but also led her, back in the 1970s, to found an influential publishing company, Bradt Travel.

In recent years, her adventurous energies have increasingly found an outlet in running. She enjoys it as part of a three-woman group, who call themselves the Old Crones with the slogan ‘We do because we can.’

Parkrun, Bradt, says has been a blessing. ‘I don’t think any of us would still be running if it wasn’t for that weekly challenge and swapping times – usually “personal worsts” and so on’.

The Crone formula for a satisfactory old age is simple. ‘It’s about finding joy in what there is rather than moaning about what there isn’t. I’m stiff and slow but that’s the penalty of being 80. It’s still a wonderful world, and if you find it wonderful, then the fact that you feel stiff and sore and creaking doesn’t matter as much as getting out there and seeing it.’

By the end, it turns out, 42 runners over 80 have finished the 5km run, with a combined age of getting on for 3,500 years. Their average time is around 43 minutes for the women and about 40½ for the men.

Globally, getting on for half of all recreational running is done by people over 40 and these, too, are getting older. There’s a big drop-off in participation between 40 and 65 but the ‘survivors’ – the people who are still running beyond retirement age and into their 70s and80s – are an increasingly visible minority.

In the 2021 London Marathon, 471 of the finishers of the actual and virtual events were over 70: 145 women and 326 men. More than 100 of these were over 75 and 17 were over 80.

Sport England’s ongoing Active Lives survey suggests that in 2020-21 there were nearly 200,000 English adults over 65 who ran at least twice a month, and 31,600 in the 75-84 range who did the same.

That’s a significant portion in a general UK running population of about 2.5 million.

These figures are tiny, relative to the wider population. But the messages are big and unambiguous. Lots of people run when they’re in their 40s: roughly one in seven. It simply isn’t unusual.

But only a few – perhaps one in 50 – will still be running when they’re 65; and even fewer will keep going into serious old age.

If these figures tell us that most people can’t keep running in much later life, they also prove that some people can.

Statistically, it remains unlikely that I – or you – will make it through the physiological minefield of our 60s and 70s without losing the ability to run. But we can enjoy trying.

And we may even find that, with the right expert guidance, we can adjust the odds in our favour. So the message from Bushy Park’s annual gathering of octogenarians is that, for those who do keep going, the rewards appear to be just as rich in terms of joy, companionship, well-being and laughter as they were at earlier stages of life.

As improbably but just-aboutachievable sporting targets go, this is not a bad one to aim at.

Maybe the London 2012 Olympics really did succeed in its declared aim to ‘inspire a generation’. It just wasn’t the generation the organisers had in mind. The difference is that we oldies and oldies-in-waiting have often experienced the lifeenhancing benefits of a running habit already.

Of course we want to keep going for the rest of our lives. Why wouldn’t we?

For more information go to www.parkrun.co.uk