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On a recent Saturday morning in a Baylands Nature Preserve parking lot, Celia Skipton was volunteering as car park marshal for a free running group when she was approached by a fellow runner with a request.
“He came over to me and we started to talk and he said, ‘Can you give me a hug?’” said Skipton, a San Mateo-based communications professional. “We ended up giving each other this wonderful hug. And he said, ‘Thank goodness for parkrun.’ I think for a lot of people it’s a lifeline.”
Skipton’s anecdote sums up the essence of parkrun, a 20-year-old global running group founded in London’s Bushy Park — it was called ‘Bushy Park Time Trial’ then — by Paul Sinton-Hewitt, who is based in Twickenham in the U.K. Every rendition since takes the name of the local park in question, suffixed with the group’s global name.
Byxbee parkrun, which was set up in 2019 by Sarah Hudson and Sam Stow, is the only parkrun in the Bay Area and is one of two parkrun locations in California; the second, a fairly new chapter, is at Ryan Bonaminio Park, east of Los Angeles. Previously, Crissy Field in San Francisco was a parkrun location, but it is now defunct. There are over 78 parkrun locations in the U.S. presently and over 2,500 spread across 23 countries.
“Twenty years ago, we started with just 13 runners and five volunteers in Bushy Park, united by a simple passion for running and community,” said parkrun founder Paul Sinton-Hewitt in an email. “Today, parkrun has grown into a global movement, with millions of registered parkrunners in 23 countries. What began as a small gathering has become a powerful force for good, promoting health, happiness, and togetherness. I’m incredibly proud of how far we’ve come, and even more excited for the future as we continue to inspire people of all abilities to get moving, connect with others, and give back through the spirit of charity and community.”
While the names and locations of these running groups scattered across the globe vary, at their core they’re all the same. It’s always a weekly 5K run — 5 kilometers is a little over 3 miles — that ends with a warm dose of socializing.
The metric system of measurement used here has less to do with standard marathon jargon and more to do with the place of the group’s founding, the U.K. Most of the early parkrun sites in the U.S. were set up by expats from England, South Africa or Australia, all places where distance is gauged in kilometers. For these parkrun pioneers, the initiative was possibly a way to feel closer to home while away from it.
Robert Hyde, for instance, first got involved with parkrun around seven years ago when he was looking for friends in the Bay Area after moving here from England. Hyde, who helped Hudson and Stow set up Byxbee parkrun, is now event director for the group in Palo Alto and event ambassador for the group on the West Coast.
To him, parkrun is more of an inclusive “social club” than an intimidating running group.
“Other running groups — you almost have to be a runner in order to go in,” he said. Here, in contrast, one can choose to walk. And though the run is timed and everyone is given a score at the end of it, there’s no pressure to finish within a certain duration, unlike in other running groups. No one finishes last because there’s a “tail walker” at the end who brings up the rear.
“And although we’re called parkrun and we sort of advertise ourselves as a running group, we’re not really. We’re more of a…social group,” Hyde added.
So while it is a running group by name, a nonprofit on paper and has found an official footwear partner in Brooks Running, it is the sense of camaraderie that characterizes it. Connecting over coffee after the run is as important as the run itself.
At parkrun, fun takes many forms, like running in a tutu or a Halloween costume, enjoying branded memorabilia like personalized T-shirts, celebrating running milestones and having a photographer document it all for digital posterity. Runners often form their own subgroups and socialize outside of parkrun over tea or drinks.
“parkrun was designed as a community event and it really brings people together,” said Foster City-based Scott Patterson, a retired pharmaceutical executive who discovered parkrun around two years ago in Australia while visiting his daughter, who encouraged him to make friends beyond work. Originally from Brisbane, Australia, Patterson has been in the U.S. for around 34 years and in the Bay Area for a decade.
“The beauty of this is when you’re traveling, you can go to a parkrun somewhere else,” he said. He has experienced parkrun across several locations in Australia and Europe, such as Donaupark parkrun in Vienna, Austria, and Milano Nord parkrun in Milan, Italy.
“When you go to a parkrun site, people are just going to be friendly. It’s just the same feeling you get wherever you go around the world. I just think that’s wonderful,” Patterson said.
The QR code participants get when first signing up can subsequently be used at any parkrun site worldwide. That also makes it hard to pin down the exact number of people signed up at Byxbee parkrun because they might have registered elsewhere on the globe.
“The thing I say to the first-timers,” said Patterson, “is you’ve now just got 300,000 new friends…whom you can catch up with across the world.”
While every parkrun is conceptually tied to the global umbrella group, each one has its own local identity. Byxbee parkrun reflects the diversity of Silicon Valley and attracts participants from different ages, professions, ethnicities, countries and languages.
“It’s a cross-section of the Peninsula,” said Hyde, citing an example of a Ukrainian runner who delights in conversing with her fellow runners using Google Translate.
Participants include locals as well as expats, visitors and travelers simply transiting through the area who might’ve experienced parkrun in other countries. San Francisco-based accountant Robert Bridges, who drives down to Byxbee Park every Saturday morning, often offers rides to tourists in the city.
“They realize Palo Alto is not as close to San Francisco as they thought so they reach out to me and I give them a ride down and they join us for our run,” he said.
Bridges, who was also involved with the core team that set up Byxbee parkrun, has been associated with the group for 10 years now. He first got started in South Africa, where he’s from; he moved from Johannesburg to the U.S. in 2018.
“I was very fortunate to have a parkrun where I moved to,” he said, referring to the one at Crissy Field in San Francisco. “I’ve done parkrun on every continent that it’s offered on — when I travel I try and find my little community on a Saturday.”
Other regulars feel the same way. “People get so hooked on parkrun, they search out parkruns in other places in the world and attend them,” said Skipton, who views impromptu hugs in the parking lot as priceless moments of warmth in these socially trying times. Originally from the U.K., she has lived in the Bay Area for 34 years.
“We talk about the health effects of loneliness and isolation — I work from home as well so I’m by myself a lot — so it’s just, I can say, life-changing,” she said about parkrun, which she first tried out in 2017 while visiting her sister in Wales. She continued the association with parkrun when she moved back to England during the pandemic. When she moved back here after the pandemic, she was delighted to discover the Palo Alto leg of parkrun. She’s now part of the core group and regularly takes on the job of run director.
“What’s so, so wonderful is that everybody gets celebrated — volunteers, runners, walkers,” she said.
Byxbee parkrun meets at 8 a.m. every Saturday at Byxbee Park, 2375 Embarcadero Road, Palo Alto. For more information, visit parkrun.us/byxbee.
