For the past few Saturdays I’ve been doing something rather uncharacteristic and getting out of bed quite early.
Even with a household of young children and penchant for running ridiculously long distances, I like to have a few extra minutes under the duvet at the weekends when I can.
But a new event in the village has seen me throwing off the blankets, kissing Becky goodbye and heading to a field with a car boot full of traffic cones.
Earlier this year I became Event Director of the new Cranleigh parkrun.
parkrun is a series of free, weekly, 5km timed runs which take place across UK and in fact across the world.
Since they started in 2004, they now take place at 297 different locations in the UK every Saturday morning at 9am. Runners of all abilities have completed a total of 5,284,872 runs, covering a total distance of 26,424,360 km. Wow!
When the local parkrun ambassador approached me looking for help, I was already familiar with the parkrun community, having taken part at Guildford parkrun (running and volunteering) and Medina IOW parkun, in Newport on the Isle of Wight (running whilst on holiday there).
The prospect of a Cranleigh parkrun was very exciting and something I was keen to see come to life, as the parkrun movement is such a great way to bring running to villages and towns.
parkrun is entirely organised by volunteers, so the first step was to form a core volunteer team who would take it in turns to be Run Director on a Saturday morning, coordinating the other volunteers and ensuring the safety of runners at the venue.
Once volunteers were in place, land use permission had been negotiated and funding for the event kindly secured from Waverley Borough Council, we held a test event for a select group of runners and volunteers in September, before our official launch on Saturday 4th October.
At our first event we had an amazing 111 runners, with representatives from 30 different athletics clubs taking part.
The following weekend, without numbers being boosted by parkrun ‘tourists’ visiting an inaugural event, we had 33 finishers.
And then last weekend, with word gradually spreading about the new local parkrun, we had 53 finishers.
I was reminded in the latest parkrun newsletter this afternoon about some of the benefits of volunteering.
As well as improving the health and well-being of the volunteer themselves, each additional volunteer increases the capacity for an event to accommodate participants, with a corresponding improvement to the health and well-being of each participant. I’d call that a win-win situation.
Volunteering at events such as parkrun also leads to an improvement in community cohesion, reductions in crime and also increases in feelings of pride and connection that people have with their surroundings.
Even the pennies spent by the volunteers and participants in the local cafes or other businesses, when added up week after week and year after year, represent significant value to the local community.
As I discovered when filming my documentary about retirement, and interviewing volunteers with the Surrey Wildlife Trust, volunteering is a great thing to consider in retirement.
It is a way of making new friends, giving something back to the local community and sharing valuable skills and experience you have gained from a lifetime of work, as well as keeping fit and active, both mentally and physically.
I’m looking forward to another early start this Saturday morning, when I’ll be marshalling at Cranleigh parkrun as another member of the core volunteer team is taking the role of Run Director for the first time.
Nick and Andy will also be there, in their now usual roles as marshals.
If you would like to get involved, either running or volunteering, do check out parkrun.org.uk/cranleigh for all the details.
