2020 started with a flourish. Went along to Ipswich to start the day with a spot of timekeeping before heading over to Felixstowe. Looking through a trawl of messages on October 1st I had said there was a chance of Felixstowe being the first 1k parkrun in Suffolk. Fortunately, I was wrong as only 888 ended up finishing the run, however it was an absolute nightmare. I was funnel manager on the day and although we started the day with a long funnel, we had to lengthen it multiple times and still ended up with people having to queue to actually cross the finish line.
We did some further Forestry England parkrun research by a trip to Salcey Forest and picked up some ideas from there.
Having got him a barcode for his birthday it was 6 weeks before Charlie crossed the finish line for the first time when he went along to Forest Rec juniors, well where else would it be!
Then Ipswich juniors made a bit of a surprise announcement as I had decided to spread the load of Event Director being bringing in a Co-ED
For the first time since it launched, 29th February was on a Saturday. For those parkrunners looking to complete the parkrun calendar (taken part in parkrun on every day of the year) this was a crucial opportunity as the next time the 29th is on a Saturday isn’t until 2048. To double my options I was tail roller at Felixstowe to achieve a participation and volunteer credit.
A week later and we were on the other side of the world. We were in that unusual position where we were at parkrun on a Saturday morning despite it still being Friday evening in the UK. For our first international parkrun we were at Hobsonville Point parkrun. As we were staying with someone who knew the course I was able to be Tail Roller so got a participation and volunteer credit. This meant I got a new flag on the challenges chrome extension
The second weekend in NZ was a bit different due to this “Covid-19” thing that was going about. Having decided that events could still go ahead parkrun introduced some new guidelines to help event teams. This meant high 5s were out and there was to be no touching of bar codes for the scanners. I was on scanning duty so as I was familiar with the parkrun app this wasn’t a problem and meant I got another volunteer credit.
Didn’t really make a blind bit of difference though as we still did token sorting in the café afterwards!!
And that was pretty much it for parkrun for another 13 months.
During the Covid-19 pause the With Me Now podcast was doing a series of daily pods and I was invited along with Katherine Goulder to talk about parkrun and MS
The 40 minute clip can be found here https://youtu.be/3ef98x9Sjwk?si=OFzoMX2AFeexKy7M or here https://www.facebook.com/WithMeNowPodcast/videos/251891419362006
It was during the discussion that the “Marriott” club became a sort of thing – this is in relation to volunteering at 100 different parkrun events.
During the parkrun pause there was a change made to parkrun merchandise which allowed people to have non parkrun event names on their apricot tee shirts. In preparation for Hilarys new event I purchased some Rendlesham Forest shirts for myself, Hilary and Colin Shaw. The first shirts arrived on June 12th
Despite not doing parkrun I was clearly still thinking about it as I had realised that my 54th birthday was on a Saturday for the first time since I was a parkrunner
parkrun had not returned by the end of 2020
During 2020 I completed 2 parkruns and recorded 24 volunteer credits. These were done at 8 events including 4 new ones, and 2 time I both ran and volunteered. This took my run total to 74 and took my Volunteer number to 675 of which 46 times I did both. These were completed at 120 different events.