February was the second of my 2 months as volunteer co-ordinator. I had done a 2 month stint last year, but I really thought January and February would have been much more difficult than it was.

It still amazes me the amount of good will from the volunteers, many of whom volunteer week in week out.  In February we also had quite a few first time volunteers, which is really nice.

Week one saw a bit of water in the park.

The following week, we saw lots of water.

The last 2 weeks of the month were almost dry, although there was a mad panic as a fallen tree was blocking the path on Friday and the event would have had to be cancelled if we couldn’t get it moved.  Luckily, the council were brilliant and they moved the poor tree and cut branches to make it passable. During another storm on Friday night another tree came down, but luckily only half blocked the path, so the event could go ahead.

Numbers in February have been fantastic, apart from the 3rd week when we have the doubt over the fallen trees and it was half term.  Every other week we had more than 100.  I would love to average over 100 runner each week during 2014.  I think we can do it.

We also had a great really nice visitors this month.  We had a big group come over from Eastbourne parkrun.  They were a really lovely group of people.  Again, of different abilities and very friendly.  We also had a 250 t-shirt in the park, which belonged to Becky Thurtell. She visited with David Piper, who himself had a 100 t-shirt. We were also visited by the Flynn family. 5 of them ran with well over 600 parkruns between them (photos below).

We have now ordered the pacer t-shirts.  We are going to have numbers 24 to 34 minutes on the t-shirts in order to cover the bulk of the runners.  We had planned to start this in February but it just didn’t happen. I’m really looking forward to launching pacer day.  It will really add to the event and I love seeing people have the chance to improve their achievements.

It’s been another amazing month for juniors in Clair Park. One of the reasons for launching parkrun was to help give others the chance to do sport in the way I did when I was a kid. I was amazing lucky.  I had 2 incredible supportive parents who did all they could to support me in my sporting activities and a school that was incredible.  In the last 2 week of the month around a quarter of the runners were juniors.  They run to the start line to get to the front and then rush to get to the first corner first.

We have already handed out quite a few 10 t-shirts (Orson and Lewis have theirs in the photo above) and there are a lot more on 6, 7 or 8 run, who will get to 10 runs in the next month or so.

I’m not going to write about parkrun every week. To be perfectly honest, it’d get a bit dull.

However, if anything out of the ordinary happens, then I will make an exception.

The weather has been appalling for the last few months.  More rain than I can remember falling before.  When we first started to plan parkrun around this time last year, we visited Clair Park and it had been raining heavily.  The section at the bottom of the course was totally flooded.  I imagine that it is down to the drains getting blocked following the leaf fall.

So I guess what greeted us was to be expected.  I had no particular role this week, so I was free to take some photos and I was lucky that it happened this week.

Here are a selection of the photos I took.  There are more at – https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.209565615909160.1073741864.136451203220602&type=3

I did wonder how people would react to this, especially the juniors. It was amazing.  Everyone got stuck in and seemed to relish it.

There seemed to be a real buzz afterwards today, as people had something extra to talk about.

The power of parkrun does not and hopefully will never cease to amaze me.

January at parkrun was fantastic.  We managed to avoid the rain on the day of the event, but there was often standing water at the bottom of the course and the finish area is a bit of a mess.  Still working on that.

We averaged over 120 people per week, with 481 people completed the course in the 4 weeks in January.

I am keen to encourage local running groups / fitness groups to visit parkrun on a Saturday morning as a social event for the group to get together and also have a lovely 5km trot around a park.

It was really lovely to welcome the Aspire ‘We Run Hassocks’ group on the 11^th January.  There were 17 or 18 of them and I recognised quite a few of them from passing them on the streets of Hassocks.  They share the same ethos that we do at parkrun.  There is a big range of abilities and everyone is extremely encouraging to each other.

It was also really nice to present t-shirt to quite a few juniors this month.  Lily and Lewis have both run all of their parkruns at Clair, so may not have been parkrunners if we hadn’t launched in Haywards Heath.  They are both from families who have really embraced parkrun as well, as siblings and parents are also running regularly.

We also presented December’s parkrunner of the month.  It’s becoming increasingly difficult to decide on the parkrunner of the month.  The folks at Tilgate warned us of this.  The awarded Jay with the award and here are his new shoes courtesy of Sweatshop.

Jay and his family have become and massive part of the parkrun team and there does seem to be a hole if they are not there.

parkrun on the 4^th was a pretty special one for me.  I had been looking forward to the New Year and the inevitable bounce in numbers that the New Year brings.  parkrun has never really been a question of numbers for me, more a question of creating a welcoming atmosphere for people to enjoy themselves.  However, the lure of getting an attendance in 3 figures each week was pretty strong.  We had 91 runners today as well.  Given the bad weather, not a bad figure.  100+ here we come.

I have been conversing on Facebook and Twitter for a while now with the McGaw family who are heavily involved with parkrun in New South Wales in Australia.  They are in Sussex visiting relatives and have decided to tour round 3 Sussex parkruns.  They have already visited Hove and Preston Park before coming down to Clair.  It was brilliant to swap running tops with David and to meet the whole family.

I bought a cake from the Real Patisserie and decorated it with the relevant flags.

It is really interesting to see that the parkrun experience over the other side of the world is the same as it is in the UK and it is fantastic to meet such like-minded people trying to achieve the same as us.  It was a real eye opener to talk about the increasing obesity problem in Australia and worries that they have over here.  Given that they are such a great sporting nation with the outdoor lifestyle that we perceive, it is hard to imagine that this is such an issue over there as well.