This past Saturday, 29 May 2021, saw the reopening of a number of parkrun venues throughout the country as head office clearance was given to cautiously venture into the return of this popular weekly family run/walk event. Unfortunately, the choice for venues was limited to ensure a progressive return after assessing the initial success after such a long layoff caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The limitation on venues reopening was to ensure that sufficient volunteers were available to act as marshals, timekeepers, and the like. Due to the long layoff, it was most likely that a lot of training or retraining had to take place so that the officials were able to “get back into gear” as it were.
There was also a limit placed on the number of participants and all registered runners were asked to only run at their home events where they were registered even if they accidentally found out about other parkrun events opening again near them. So, for example hypothetically, if any runners were registered at Kakamas, those registered in Parys could not go down there. (Please note that Kakamas is only mentioned to put the point across and is not an actual event site). To ensure that the above rule was applied as strictly as possible, only home participants registered at those opening venues were informed. Thus, the opening venues were not commonly known to all registered parkrunners in South Africa. Parys is not included in the list of venues reopening. Great care was taken to allocate the opening events to smaller events where smaller numbers could be catered for. ”We have deliberately chosen some of our smaller parkruns that are also, geographically far distant from any of the big metropolitan areas.
This will ensure that we are in no danger of transgressing any of the current lockdown regulations.” The above statements are attributed to parkrun CEO, Bruce Fordyce, from the official news blog of parkrun SA. The feedback and success of this past weekend is being assessed this week and the outcome in the form of recommendations will determine the future of parkrun venues opening again under the present Lockdown limitations imposed which determines the maximum number of participants.
Obviously, announcements from the government regarding the return to higher levels of lockdown will influence the decision of parkrun being allowed to continue or not under those conditions. In the meantime, parkrun, during Lockdown, had to brainstorm and come up with all kinds of ideas to motivate its immobile and frustrated runners. The idea of (not)parkrun was born and as from 1 June 2020 individual registered parkrun members could run daily anywhere on their own and capture their own times and submit these by the end of the week on their individual profiles. Thus, you can acquire 7 runs per week maximum. The only proviso is that you must be a registered parkrun participant with your own unique member number. Accordingly, a few brave and fit runners and walkers took up the challenge and walked or ran their own 5km routes and submitted their times daily or weekly. To date some runners have been able to submit records daily since inception of this innovative offspring.
Soon they will be able to claim 365 runs for a full year of (not)parkrun participation, and indeed with only 224 events in South Africa, some runners are already on their second round of (not)running all the events virtually. A few of our locally registered parkrun members have achieved 100 and 200 (not)parkrun milestones in this manner as one is not able to run every day or started way after inception date. An interesting aside of this (not)parkrun is that you can change your virtual venue every day, so your run becomes a virtual tourist one. Thus, some runners have become virtual tourists and have achieved such 100, or 200 plus (not)tourist parkrun milestones. Our current Parys Run Directors are thrilled at the aspect of parkrun opening again within a short space of a few months at most. In the meantime, it is noteworthy that the Parys parkrun venue we all once knew no longer exists in its old format due to the closing of Mimosa to the public. Currently the new Run Directors have forwarded a new proposed route which was extensively modified to incorporate the loss of Mimosa and still match the target of 5km whilst retaining a large portion of the old route.
The team with its volunteer support group will be ready to host the Parys parkrun again as soon as the all-clear is given by head office. To register for parkrun, go to www.parkrun.co.za , register Parys as your homerun event and obtain your unique member number. Every time you complete a 5km event your number will be scanned into the results basis and an email will be posted to you indicating interesting stats such as age group category position, time and overall position, improvement in personal best (PB) time, etc. and while you are waiting for the real thing, you are welcome to engage in some virtual (not)parkrun events. For more information on parkrun contact Monica Muller or Johan Bosman respectively on 064-619 3348 or 060-495 7345.
