More than 1000 runners, walkers and joggers have met at the Soundshell in Timaru each Saturday morning since May to take part in the Caroline Bay parkrun.
Parkrun is a global organisation that encourages people to get outdoors and walk, jog or run 5km on a set day, each week.
Since the Caroline Bay parkrun began, 31 runs have been held with 4601 5km distances being completed by 1308 unique participants.
Caroline Bay parkrun event director Colin Macpherson said it had been great to see the community embrace the event throughout the course of the year.
‘‘When we started we thought we’d be lucky if we could get between 100 and 150 people coming each week. As we get to summer time we’ve been getting up to the 180 people mark with a few 190s as well.
‘‘Participation wise, the event has just exceeded expectations, and it’s been really exciting to do that. We’ve got a really good core team of people that rock on up every week or every other week, and they get something out of it, which is really important to us and to parkruns in general.
‘‘The whole idea of a parkrun internationally is to have it going forever. So we would love to keep it going on a Saturday morning here forever as well, because it’s such a positive thing for the community and we get lots of really great feedback.’’
He said one of the big goals for next year was to break the 200 participants mark for an event.
‘‘We’ve been close a couple of times — at the end of September we had 198. So a bit of a cheeky goal is seeing if we can try and break that 200 mark. We’ve got a third box of tokens that starts at 200 and we’ve yet to crack it.
‘‘Numbers for us are one thing but we also want to keep seeing people achieving their own goals.
‘‘It’s been amazing to watch people get so much faster and fitter through the last few months. It’s quite amazing to see people’s progress. On average every week we’re having a quarter of the people that do it recording a better time than the previous event.’’
Weekly parkruns will continue through the holiday season with the only exception being a parkrun on New Year’s day to replace the one on Saturday, January 3 which has had to be cancelled due to the Caroline Bay Carnival.
Mr Macpherson wished to extend a big thank you to everyone who had made the first year of the Caroline Bay parkrun a success.
‘‘I just want to thank the local community for getting behind this and supporting and embracing this event, because it was something that it took a fair bit of time to get over the line and we didn’t know what to expect with it.
‘‘It’s incredibly rewarding to have people enjoying it, enjoying themselves and being grateful to our volunteers and our team. We’d love to see some more people come down on a Saturday morning and be part of the journey.’’
Anyone wanting more information on the Caroline Bay parkrun can visit its Facebook page or the Caroline Bay section on the parkrun website.
