Parkrunners set to protest this weekend, plus why Im non-plussed by the Hardest Geezers athleticism

The campaign by parkrunners to bring back the stats reaches crunch point in coming days with a co-ordinated protest on Saturday (April 13) and a face-to-face meeting with parkrun chief executive Russ Jefferys on April 27.

Almost 25,000 people have signed one of two online petitions calling for course and age category records to be returned to the parkrun website. This weekend runners are also planning to support what is being called The Big Bring Back the Stats Saturday.

Will Hartley, one of the campaigners, says: The protest is simply to run or volunteer at your local parkrun, take a selfie and post the photo up on social media, potentially on your local parkrun Facebook page in a positive way to show support and encourage parkrun to bring back the stats.

T-shirts can be bought here but Hartley adds: Some people may want to wear their own home-made shirts rather than buying them, which is cool, others may choose to not enter the funnel or not scan their barcode. But the main thing is we are showing some awareness and reminding parkrun to take our meeting on April 27 seriously.

Hartley and Mary Taylor, the latter being the writer of the main petition, plan to use their meeting with Jefferys to voice the concerns of the thousands who have signed the petitions.

He says: We want the fastest 500, age-graded league, sub-17 male, sub-20 female, age-category lists, most events, most national first finishes and first finishers, and all the rest of them back for those that just plain like them and those that got a sense of achievement from them!

Another important point that has come up in the last two months, he adds, is that people feel they dont have a say in parkrun and the decisions just come top down, their focus groups and listening to brand ambassadors isnt enough, and as a community organisation parkrun should have ordinary parkrunners from around the world represented in some way in running parkrun and their decision making.

Why Im going all Ebenezer about the Hardest Geezer

Kudos to the Hardest Geezer for running the length of Africa and raising more than 700,000 for charity in the process.

Yet Im not sure I agree with fellow journalists who have gushingly described him as an endurance athlete and potential BBC sports personality of the year winner.

Some have called his year-long adventure one of the greatest ultra-running feats in history, which is a claim that would probably make bona fide ultra legends like Yiannis Kouros, Aleksandr Sorokin and Kilian Jornet squirm, whereas Don Ritchie is no doubt turning in his grave at all the fuss.

One YouTuber with hundreds of thousands of followers even tweeted a photo of the Hardest Geezer alongside images of Bobby Moore lifting the World Cup and Neil Armstrong stepping on to the surface of the moon. Id like to think it was a joke but Im not so sure.

As the story has snowballed across the media, I fear people have been struck down with Hardest Geezer fever. In recent days he seems to have featured in pretty much every media outlet.

No doubt much of the coverage is not just due to his impressive endurance but the fact he has a cool nickname, he looks very quirky and cool with his long red beard, he marches with an army of eager sponsors each with their own PR department and his ultra-distance run involved fantastical stories such as being mugged by machete-wielding thieves.

Unlike your typical introverted, media-shy ultra-runner, the Hardest Geezer also knows how deliver a juicy quote. After stopping briefly due to injury, he said: No bone damage so figured the only option left was to stop mincing about like a little weasel, get the strongest painkillers available and zombie stomp road again.

Sky has followed the story particularly closely, sending their sports correspondent Rob Harris out to Tunisia to capture the moment the Hardest Geezer finished his trek. The mass of people joining him in his final strides resembled something out of Monty Pythons Life of Brian and three days later Sky News were still interviewing him in their studio.

The week before the Hardest Geezer finished his run across Africa, the World Cross Country Championships took place in Serbia. It is renowned for being the toughest race in the world with the winners having a fair right to call themselves the worlds best all-round endurance runner. Yet the event was woefully ignored by the media.

Increasingly, the wider media is only interested in zany and colourful novelty moments. Wrinkle the duck running the New York City Marathon, for instance, probably received more coverage than the actual winners of the race.

The Hardest Geezer on the other hand is brilliant story of adventure and endurance. Id argue its just not an athletics story and I imagine the many Olympians and potential Olympians in the world would kill for just 1% of the coverage hes enjoyed in recent days.

Four legs beat two (almost) every time

Even in retirement, Usain Bolt cant avoid competition. There seem to have been a spate of computer simulation races lately with Bolt compared to footballer Kylian Mbappe and now a greyhound.

Not surprisingly, the greyhound emerged the winner, too, covering 100m in 5.80 seconds almost four seconds quicker than Bolt.

A few years ago we ran a fun feature in AW on an animal Olympics which showed that even a humble domestic cat would easily beat the worlds top sprinters such as Bolt. In fact, many animals can out-run humans over short distances. Over long distances they struggle, though, due to their inability to cool down by sweating.

Given this, whereas Bolt is easily the worlds best-known athlete in recent years, the true superstars are the ultra runners, as they can defeat anything the animal kingdom throws at them.

Apart from birds, that is.

World Cross in crisis (yet again)

With thin crowds and a relatively uninspiring course in Belgrade last month, the World Cross Country Championships seems to have taken two steps forward (with Aarhus 2019 and Bathurst 2023) and one step back.

Jonathan Gault was the only journalist from the written media from North America who made the trip to Belgrade and hes written an in-depth piece on how to make the World Cross matter here.

In it he explains an idea suggested by his colleague, Robert Johnson, whereby the World Cross becomes a qualification event for the 10,000m at the Olympics and World Champs.

Of course this topic has been tackled regularly in AW over the years and as a big supporter of the event I found it particularly depressing back in 2013 when Belgrade (coincidentally) was the venue for a global seminar organised by World Athletics (or the IAAF as it was then) to talk about resurrecting the fortunes of the World Cross, but barely anything was achieved.

That particular gathering attracted a number of cross country legends, plus delegates from parts of the world like the Caribbean known more for their sprinting than stamina. A number of stalwart organisers from the English Cross Country Association and British Athletics Cross Challenge, meanwhile, didnt even realise it was happening.

I didnt attend the conference myself but kept an eye on what came out of it and, apart from a large review booklet that came out some months later, there were few original ideas that were put into actual action.

Ideas are not rocket science. As I wrote some years ago: Efforts should be made to hold the World Cross in glamorous, big-city venues like New Yorks Central Park or Londons Parliament Hill. The date should change so the meeting does not clash with the more lucrative spring road races. The course should also be tough and challenging rather than being a glorified track race on grass with a few token hurdles or man-made mounds.

READ MORE: AW blog archive

At least the problem of the date is now being addressed with the 2026 event in Tallahassee in mid-January. But there is also an elephant in the room lack of prize money.

Compared to track and field and the more lucrative road running circuit, cross-country running offers few financial benefits for its competitors.

In a week that saw the welcome move of $50,000 going to Olympic champions in Paris, it would be nice to see more cash pumped into cross-country running. Only then might we see more athletes take part.