Ballina Parkrun to celebrate significant milestone next month
The free community event, which takes place every Saturday morning at 9.30am from Ballina Soccer Club, averages 50 to 90 runners and walkers on a weekly basis and is organised by volunteers.
When Ballina parkrunners got together for their weekly outing on the first Saturday of October this year, the minds of the organisers and participants were on remembering the world’s first ever organised parkrun.
Twenty years ago that same weekend, Londoner Paul Sinton-Hewitt, an amateur club runner who had been injured and was suffering from depression, brought together some friends to run in the city’s Bushy Park to help pull himself from the darkness. And thus the parkrun movement was born.
Now with events in over 2,400 locations around the world, it has grown from 13 parkrun pioneers to more than 10 million registered parkrunners, and an impressive 98 million people have taken part over the 20-year history of the movement.
Ballina Parkrun will celebrate its own milestone next month, when the event will be ten years old, and is now fast approaching its 430th organised Saturday morning get-together.
Some 62 people took part in the Ballina Parkrun that marked that 20th anniversary and first home on the day was Andrew Conway, with Grace Dempsey the first female home.
A welcome was extended to newcomers Natalie Warman, Michael O’Donoghue, Roisin Ruddy, Sinead O’Reilly and Maeve and Roisin Callaghan.
The free community event, which takes place every Saturday morning at 9.30am from Ballina Soccer Club, averages 50 to 90 runners and walkers on a weekly basis and is organised by volunteers.
The Ballina group extended a special thanks to Ann Egan, who first brought the run to Ballina, and to Anne Daly, Deirdre Medlar, Keith O’Brien, Mairead Maguire, Malachy McCarron, Michelle Reynolds and Paul Hogan, all of whom help to keep Ballina Parkrun going.
Anyone interested in signing up for Ballina Parkrun can do so at the Parkun website on www.parkrun.ie. All you need to do then is to show up on Saturday and bring your barcode.
