I registered for parkrun one night when I was working at Bank City and my friend Almanda was also working. I didn’t really know her well and she came to sit in our area and started talking. I registered and printed copies of my barcode and was ready. I decided to do the Ebotse parkrun on my own the following Saturday morning. It was the 22 April 2017.
I wasn’t sure what to expect or whether I could walk 5kms and wasn’t really sure that walking was acceptable at an event called parkrun. I arrived and listened to the first timers briefing and then joined the crowd and did my very first parkrun. My time was just over an hour, I was proud that I completed it and have been hooked ever since. I got several PB’s (personal best’s) in a row after that and got my time down to 46m53 by December of that year.
Since then, I have gone on to do 124 different parkruns in 10 different countries.
The countries are
South Africa
Swaziland
Namibia
Italy
France
Australia
Scotland
Netherlands
Denmark
Russia
I’ve met lovely people along the way and things have changed a lot since I started including Covid, where we couldn’t have parkrun at all, Russia being kicked out of the parkrun community, France not starting up again because they need medical certificates for people to run, new countries added, a wonderful new app called 5k that keeps all your starts and your barcode. In the early days, if you didn’t have your printed barcode you could not be credited for a run at all and people would have copes of their friends’ barcodes just in case.
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