I have only been to four parkruns, spread across three different locations, so I am hardly chasing down the milestone badges. Yet every single time, without fail, I have come away with the same feeling: a sense of achievement mixed with a kind of shared pride that is hard to find anywhere else on a Saturday morning. It might be a nod to a stranger at the start line, a smile from someone at the finish, a grudging acknowledgement of a runner who had more in their legs as they passed me in the final metres, or a simple thank you from a volunteer who has been standing in the cold so that the rest of us could run.
I wanted to understand why something so simple leaves people feeling that way, and it turns out researchers have been asking the same question.
What the research looked at
In 2020, a team of academics led by Dr Anne Grunseit from the University of Sydney published a scoping review of the research on parkrun (opens in a new tab), gathering every peer-reviewed study they could find on who takes part, what it does for them and why it appeals. They found 15 studies published up to the end of 2019, twelve from the UK and three from Australia, combining interviews with participants, large surveys and studies that followed new parkrunners over a full year.
The authors point out that parkrun is unusual among efforts to get people more active. It began in 2004 as a single event in Bushy Park and, by the time of the review, had spread to 22 countries, with more than four million people having taken part. Most physical activity programmes that work in small trials never manage to grow beyond them, while parkrun grew largely through community demand and volunteers.
Fitter, more active and happier
The headline findings are encouraging. In her summary for the parkrun blog (opens in a new tab), Dr Grunseit explains that participants showed improvements in fitness, total physical activity and mood, including stress, anxiety and depression.
One large UK study of more than 7,000 parkrunners found that their age-adjusted times improved by around 10% on average between their first run and their fastest that year. The biggest gains, at almost 16%, came from people who had not been runners when they signed up, and the more regularly someone took part, the more they tended to improve. Another study followed new registrants for a year and found that their weekly physical activity had risen at six months and was still higher than when they started at twelve months, alongside increases in happiness and falls in stress and in the number of people at risk of depression.
What Dr Grunseit describes as most encouraging is that the benefits were largest for those who were least active when they registered, and that there appears to be a dose response, meaning the more often someone turns up, the bigger the positive effect. People also tend to keep coming back. In that year-long study, just over half of the new parkrunners were still taking part after twelve months, which compares very well with research on gym memberships, where most new members had stopped within three months.
A sense of achievement, for everyone
The studies that asked people about their experiences help explain why. Interviews with parkrunners who had a history of mental health difficulties identified three things that mattered most to them, which the researchers summarised as "sense of achievement", "it's for everyone" and "connecting with others". Participants described parkrun improving their mood and confidence and reducing their sense of isolation.
That first theme is the one I recognise most clearly in myself. I have a habit of running myself into the ground at every parkrun, which is probably not the smartest approach, but there is something about the timed 5K and the people around you that makes you want to find out what you are capable of. One study measured how people felt immediately before and after a parkrun and found improvements in self-esteem, stress and mood straight away, with enjoyment and satisfaction with their own performance playing a part. Crossing the line, completely spent, and feeling better than when I arrived is exactly that.
The review also highlights how parkrun gives people who would never call themselves runners a new identity. Walking is welcome, nobody finishes last because a volunteer tail walker always comes in behind the final participant, and the milestone t-shirts reward turning up rather than speed. One researcher even suggested that parkrun works as a kind of "third place", somewhere besides home and work where regulars gather and support one another, while another study found that the more strongly people identified as part of their parkrun, the more satisfied they were with life.
The small moments add up
Although running at parkrun is a solo activity for me, the event itself is anything but. Part of the joy of a Saturday morning is seeing the gatherings of friends, families and dogs, all getting something done together before most of the city has had breakfast, and noticing the volunteers who make it possible each week.
The research suggests those small interactions are doing real work. The review describes parkrun as a place for informal social contact, where people build social ties gradually through repeated encounters and through volunteering, which also allows people to take part without running or walking at all. The nod at the start and the thank you at the finish might feel trivial in the moment, but they are precisely the kind of light, repeated connections that help people feel they belong somewhere.
Who parkrun is still missing
The review is honest about the limits of what we know. Most research has been done in the UK and Australia, and it has mainly studied people who already take part, so in the authors' words we know why it works for those it works for. Participants in the studies tended to come from higher socio-economic groups and were overwhelmingly white, and one study found that some sites, London among them, lacked diversity in ethnicity and religion. The researchers call for more work on people who register but never attend, those who stop coming, and how parkrun can become more inclusive for people with health conditions, disabilities or from deprived communities.
For a free event open to anyone, that matters, and it is a useful reminder that turning up at a start line can feel much harder for some people than for others.
Adding to my list
I plan to add many more locations to my list of three, and hopefully pick up a few personal bests along the way, though I suspect I will keep running myself into the ground regardless. If the research is right, the regularity matters as much as the effort, so the real goal is simply to keep turning up.
It would be good to share one with other members of the RLS community before long, so if you fancy a Saturday morning 5K, a coffee afterwards and a few more nods at the start line, keep an eye out for a meet-up.
Sources
- Grunseit, A. C., Richards, J., Reece, L., Bauman, A. and Merom, D. (2020), Evidence on the reach and impact of the social physical activity phenomenon parkrun: a scoping review (opens in a new tab), Preventive Medicine Reports
- Grunseit, A. (2020), Evidence on the reach and impact of parkrun: a review (opens in a new tab), parkrun blog
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