Read an extract from On Every Saturday – a celebration of parkrun in Australia!

Every Saturday morning, tens of thousands of Australians come together in hundreds of locations, right across the country, to participate in the extraordinary community-based, volunteer-led, five-kilometre phenomenon called parkrun. On Every Saturday is a new full-colour book by David Crook (Australian diplomat and self-professed mid-life crisis runner). It’s a joyful celebration of Australia’s first ten parkrun years, as well as the power of community and the spirit of ‘getting out there’.

Today, we have an extract from On Every Saturday for you to check out – read on!

On Every Saturday: Introduction

by David Crook

parkrun: a timed, five-kilometre event, held every Saturday morning, at over 400 Australian locations, where everyone is welcome to participate – to walk, jog, run, spectate or volunteer – and it’s absolutely free.

On every Saturday morning, tens of thousands of Australians come together in hundreds of locations, right across the country, to participate in the extraordinary community-based, volunteer-led phenomenon called parkrun.

From its first Australian event, on the Gold Coast in April 2011, parkrun has grown to over 400 Australian locations and over 990,000 registered participants, inside its first decade. In those first ten years, Australian parkrunners completed an astonishing 9,810,901 parkruns – walking, jogging or running – at an amazing 78,533 events.

Then, on the first Saturday of its second Australian decade, 3 April 2021, another 47,076 people walked, jogged or ran a parkrun, with more than 4000 others participating as volunteers to make these parkruns possible. Despite the interruptions of the 2020 and early 2021 COVID shutdown periods, parkrun in Australia was well and truly back in town.

This book celebrates Australia’s first ten parkrun years. It outlines parkrun’s history, in Australia and across the world; provides examples of Australia’s amazing parkruns and the people who’ve created them; explains how easy it is to become involved; and describes the different forms that involvement can take.

After ten years of parkrun in Australia, it’s easy to forget that it’s still a relatively new phenomenon – that there wasn’t anything like it in Australia just a few short years ago. As Tim Oberg, the person who brought parkrun to Australia, says, that short history means we don’t yet know the long-term impact that parkrun will deliver.

‘When I was growing up,’ Tim says, ‘there wasn’t anywhere you could go for a group five-kilometre Saturday morning run. Now we see whole families coming to walk or run or volunteer. We have babies going round the course in prams who’ll grow up with parkrun as a regular part of their lives. Who can guess at the long-term health benefits that will bring?’ I wrote this book because I’m grateful to all of the parkrun volunteers and HQ staff who make the Australian parkrun story possible.

My own parkrun story started when friends invited me to go along to their ‘local’ parkrun in Evesham in the UK. Now my local is North Sydney – and the idea that there is a fantastic timed event, organised entirely by volunteers, right at the end of my street, that is on every Saturday, and is absolutely free to participate in, is still a little hard for me to believe.

For existing Australian parkrunners, I hope this book tells you at least a few things about parkrun that you didn’t already know. For parkrunners’ families and friends, I hope that after reading the book, you might think your parkrunner is not quite so crazy as you’d thought. You might even think that parkrun is something you’d like to try. For people who know nothing about parkrun, or perhaps know just a little, but have never gone along, I hope you might consider what parkrun could become for you.

And for everyone who reads it, I hope this book has emphasised that parkrun is a place where everyone is welcome – to walk, to jog, to run, to spectate or to volunteer. That it isn’t just about the walk or run – and it certainly isn’t about a person’s finish time – it’s about so much more than that.

As parkrun’s founder, Paul Sinton-Hewitt, describes it, ‘parkrun is a social movement for the common good’. Free, for everyone, forever.

—On Every Saturday by David Crook and Lisa Millar (Brio Books) is out now.

On Every Saturday

A celebration of the people, stats and stories behind parkrun in Australia

by David Crook, with a foreword by Lisa Millar

On every Saturday morning, tens of thousands of Australians come together in hundreds of locations, right across the country, to participate in the extraordinary community-based, volunteer-led, five-kilometre phenomenon called parkrun. Everyone is welcome to participate – to walk, jog, run, spectate or volunteer – and it’s absolutely free.

From its first Australian event on the Gold Coast in 2011, parkrun has grown to over 400 Australian locations...

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