One of the 13 runners at the first ever parkrun has revealed what he got completely wrong – as the charity reaches its millionth event
A runner who was among the 13 who took part in the first ever parkrun said he had not foreseen its worldwide popularity, as the charity marks its millionth event this weekend. Retired accountant Andrew Lane, who took part in the first parkrun at Bushy Park in Richmond in October 2004, said that “my own prediction record has been very poor”.
Mr Lane, 69, now of Wymondham, Norfolk, said that in the early days he had predicted that Bushy parkrun attendances would peak at 200 “because runners won’t want to be as crowded on that route”. At Bushy parkrun’s 1,000th event in August 2024, the attendance was a record 6,204.
“I remember saying at one point that in the UK it would probably plateau at about 20 events on a Saturday,” said Mr Lane. “I thought there’ll be one in every major city, perhaps a few extra in London. I could not have been more wrong there either.”
There are now more than 2,800 parkrun event locations in 23 countries. “Perhaps what I failed to realise was how much volunteering would become a great pleasure and destination in itself,” he said.
“I imagined it would be finding volunteers that would hold the growth back and while that’s sometimes been tricky, overall and across the world that hasn’t been the case. I know lots of people who prefer volunteering to running.”
Asked if he had any sense that it was the beginning of something, Mr Lane said: “Not at all, and in fact two weeks later there were only 11 people there so I really wondered is this going to take off or not. I just thought this is another nice, informal running event.
“I was in the mindset of a road racer and I thought well this is nice, this is a little 5k race, as I thought of it, an extra one we don’t have to pay for, we can turn up.
“So no sense at all of what it would become and that’s what makes it so lovely every Saturday to sort of pinch myself and experience what it has become.”
He said it was “really extraordinary” that the milestone of one million parkrun events would be reached this weekend.
Mr Lane said he knew parkrun founder Paul Sinton-Hewitt as he had previously been in his then running club in south-west London, the Stragglers, before moving to Ranelagh Harriers.
“I knew him well and used to run and train with him quite often,” said Mr Lane. “So he had been talking about it (parkrun, as it is now known) for a while and then launch day came. I encouraged all my fellow Stragglers to turn up and I thought the turn out on day one was pathetic. I thought there would be 50 or 100 people and as you know there were only 13.”
He said there were no marshals, Mr Sinton-Hewitt briefed participants on the course and “most of us knew that route anyway as we were regular runners there”.
“The different feature compared to road races we did was everything was done at the finish and that was a masterstroke really for parkrun’s growth,” said Mr Lane.
“Because he wasn’t taking money anyone could just turn up and at the finish he timed us, gave us a token with our finishing position on that he’d got from a hardware store and told us to write our names on the clipboard in the back of his car.”
Mr Lane, who now runs with Wymondham Athletics Club, has completed more than 600 parkruns and volunteered more than 200 times.
He said parkrun is “just the happiest place to be on a Saturday morning”.
“I also go to football, I’m a season ticket holder at Norwich and enjoy football,” he said.
“After a football match I’d say at least half the fans go home a bit unhappy because either their team has lost or their team hasn’t won by as many goals as they thought it should have.
“And the contrast is at a parkrun I’d say maybe 95% of people go home happy and the other 5% are the ones who want to be five seconds quicker.
“It’s just a lovely glow of social interaction, outdoor exercise and that’s the feeling I get every Saturday.”
He said that parkrun “certainly wouldn’t have expanded in the way it did without lots and lots of other people to help”.
