What Do 400,000 People A Week Get From Running Round Their Park?

Answer: 😊

Friend of Bill’s Mother’s Professor Steve Haake OBE, has just published a paper at PLOS Global Public Health (with colleagues Andy Hext and Charlotte Benkowitz) titled “A generic model of life satisfaction: the case study of parkrun.”

In this post, Steve gives a non-academic’s insight into the paper’s conclusions: essentially, that the main benefit of parkrun is to make people happier.

Prof Steve Haake O.B.E.

On average, parkrun, improves the life satisfaction of parkrunners. We know this from work we carried out last year from a huge survey of participants in the regular Saturday 5K run that takes place in thousands of places across the world (including seven park runs in Sheffield).

But what we couldn’t answer was how it makes that difference to people. Was it the actual running or walking during the event that increased life satisfaction? Was it improved physical health? Improved mental health? Was it the coffee and cake afterwards, or the gentle banter with fellow parkrunners?

Luckily, the parkrun organisation gave us a chance to find out, with another survey late in 2024, sent to almost a million parkrunners who’d done at least one parkrun in the previous 12 months. After months of number crunching from the 78,662 responses, we have some answers.

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