For some, the idea of a Christmas that contains any more exertion than reaching for the Quality Street is the stuff of nightmares. But for others, the most wonderful time of the year would not be complete without a festive parkrun.
For the uninitiated, these free, timed, 5km runs take place on Saturday mornings in 22 countries across five continents, with 9 million registered participants worldwide.
The festive period is an exception to the Saturday time slot. Around the world, event teams can hold an extra run on New Year’s Day and each country has one other slot to put on an extra event – in the UK, it is Christmas Day.
So while most will be cracking open the buck’s fizz and breakfast shortbread, some will be lacing up their trainers and heading out to add another parkrun to their tally.
Diana Hodges, 45, a digger driver from Warwickshire, is so committed to parkrun that she flew home partway through a weekend with friends in Barcelona – where there are no parkruns – to go for a run before flying back out for the rest of the weekend.
She has been running for just over two years but is already working towards her fifth alphabet – a popular challenge among parkrun obsessives to do 25 runs with each location beginning with each letter of the alphabet, with the letter X excluded.
“I’m absolutely obsessed with the challenges,” she said. “I absolutely love it, it’s the community, everyone is so supportive, it doesn’t matter what rate of running or walking or jogging you’re at.”
She will do one on Christmas Day, before having lunch with family, then will also fly to Poland that evening for the extra Boxing Day run, as well as running the following Saturday and New Year’s Day.
“The one I did last year [on Christmas Day] so many people dressed up in all of the Santa costumes and everything, and to see so many like-minded people in the same place, for the same reason, it’s absolutely brilliant.”
Catherine Aspinall finally became an “alphabeteer”this year, five years after she started.
“Completing the alphabet has not only been a personal challenge, which I feel proud for having achieved, but has also given me the opportunity to spend time with some of my favourite people, and see some wonderful places, which I wouldn’t ever have visited otherwise,” she said.
Aspinall, 40, has been to Staffordshire to run Isabel Trail for an I, to York to collect a Y, to Glasgow twice for a Q [Queen’s] and a V [Victoria] and even to Devon for an unofficial “X” in Exmouth.
However, the slight difficulty is there are no “Z” parkruns in the UK. And so in October she booked a trip to Poland, where of the several “Z” parkruns on offer she opted for Zamek w Malborku, sprinting across the finish line beside the imposing castle. As did your correspondent, who completed the alphabet challenge alongside her.
While Aspinall has done many runs solo or with friends – myself included – she has also run others with her seven-year-old son Rory, family friend Jake Lawless, 14, and her dad, Stephen Senior.
Becky Wheaver-Clarke, 37, a support manager for a charity, and her husband, Daniel Clarke, 34, from Daventry, ran a parkrun on the morning of their wedding in August, along with several of their guests.
“We literally planned our whole wedding, the timings of the day, to give us enough time to do parkrun,” she said.
On their honeymoon, the couple flew to Singapore to run three parkruns. “We planned our honeymoon to take account of three weekends,” Wheaver-Clarke said.
Their Christmas will also involve doing the extra two festive parkruns as well as their normal Saturday runs. “We wouldn’t ever not do them,” she said. “Last year we went away for a couple of days over Christmas to do some parkruns down in Exeter.”
She added: “For me, it’s not even about the running. It gives me a bit of accountability, because if the week’s gone rubbish, and I haven’t got outside or haven’t done any exercise, I will not miss parkrun.
“It’s seeing your friends, it’s meeting new people. We see new parts of the country that we would never see, or places that we would never think to go to.”
