Title: Parkrun
Author: Debra Bourne
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 360
Rating: 3.5/5
I picked up this book as a Christmas present for my dad, who’s also a big fan of parkrun, and I thought that I should probably pick it up and read it first. You know, to make sure that it’s a good book. Don’t worry though, he doesn’t follow me on social media and probably won’t see this review. Probably.
If you haven’t heard of parkrun before then you’ve obviously not asked me about my weekend plans of late. It’s essentially a free, weekly 5K run that takes place in parks all over the country (and the world), and it’s one of those things where once you go to one of them, you’re likely to become addicted. I’ve been every Saturday this year except for the first one, when my local parkrun was cancelled due to bad weather.
Debra Bourne’s books aims to chart the history of parkrun from its inception in Bushy Park to the present day, and that brings us to my only problem with it. I can’t vouch for the latest edition, and I don’t even know if there is one, but the copy that I read only took us up to 2014 or so. That made it feel as though it only covered half the story.
Parkrun has continued to grow in the years since, surviving COVID-19 and coming out kicking, and there have been all sorts of interesting (and controversial) developments. Bourne dedicated a chunk of the book to talking about how important the statistics are to runners, and they’ve since been taken away by parkrun, ostensibly because they stop people from taking part. It would also have been nice to have read about the politics that have stopped parkrun from continuing in France.
But while those are little quibbles and things that I would have liked to have seen, I can’t exactly blame Bourne. On top of that, I was mostly interested in reading about the early days, and she had those nicely covered with quotes from the people involved. So all in all, not bad.
