I have a colleague called Mike who talks about parkrun the way some people talk about God. Not aggressively, which would be easier to dismiss. Just with this constant, low-level certainty that it is good and you should try it and you will be glad you did. He's been saying this to me for about two years.

I nodded along. I said "yeah maybe." I meant "absolutely not, Mike."

Then I came last in the dads' race at my daughter's school sports day in September.

Not near the bottom. Not in the bottom half. Last. Eleven dads, most of them older than me, and I finished after all of them. One of them had a bad knee. Another was wearing loafers.¹ I stood at the finish line breathing like a man who had been asked to breathe for the first time, and my daughter - seven years old, absolutely devastated - said "it's okay Dad, you probably just need more practice."

Which is to say: I started running.

* * *

The first thing about parkrun that nobody tells you is that it isn't really a race. I knew this intellectually and completely failed to prepare for it emotionally. I showed up to Roundhay Park in January with the energy of someone who had decided to compete, and I spent the first 400 metres overtaking people before I understood, too late, that several of those people were in their seventies and doing their 300th parkrun and were absolutely fine with where they were in the pack.

The second thing about parkrun is that everyone is embarrassingly nice. I don't mean polite. I mean genuinely, aggressively nice, in a way that makes you feel slightly suspicious at first, like there's a catch.² People cheer each other. The faster runners come back and clap you in at the end. A woman called Janet has been doing Roundhay every Saturday for four years and she knows the marshal names and brings homemade flapjack sometimes and everything about her life choices seems, in retrospect, very correct.

I finished my first one in 38:14. I was third from last. I was thrilled.

* * *

Here's what's happened in eleven Saturdays:

My PB is now 32:47, which is not fast by any definition but is apparently significant enough that Mike sent me a congratulations text at 9am on a Saturday morning, which I think means I've crossed some invisible threshold into being a parkrun person. My GPS watch (a Garmin Forerunner 55, purchased on the basis of research that lasted approximately two weeks longer than it should have) now records things like "aerobic benefit" and "training load" and I look at these numbers and nod as if I understand them.

I also stopped drinking in January, which is not unrelated to any of this. Partly because you can't really run a parkrun on a hangover - or you can, but it is deeply unpleasant - and partly because something about being up at 8:30 on a Saturday doing something genuinely healthy made the Friday night habit feel a bit pointless. One replaced the other without me really deciding anything.

The kids find this baffling. My 13-year-old asked if I was "having a crisis." I told him it was parkrun, not a Harley-Davidson. He said he didn't see the difference.³

* * *

What I've learned, eleven weeks in:

The gear matters less than you think but you'll buy it anyway. I have four pairs of running socks and can tell you the thread count of each one. I'm not proud of this. The HOKAs⁴ do genuinely make a difference. The GPS watch is optional and I would miss it if I didn't have it, which is probably a bad sign about me as a person.

Running in January in Leeds is its own kind of character-building. The park is beautiful in a bleak, this-is-actually-fine way. You go from being cold to being warm so quickly that the first kilometre always tricks you into thinking you've misjudged the pace. You haven't. You've just stopped being cold.

The post-run hour is, genuinely, the best hour of the week. I've started having an IMPOSSIBREW when I get back - non-alcoholic, slightly functional, tastes like a lager⁵ - and there's something about cold beer at 10am when you've done something that feels disproportionately satisfying. My wife said I looked "dangerously cheerful" three Saturdays ago and I think that was a compliment.

Mike says "I told you so" every week. He's not wrong.

* * *

I don't know how long I'll keep doing this. I never planned to start, so predicting when I'll stop seems equally unreliable. What I can say is that for eleven Saturdays in a row I have done a thing I didn't think I could do, slightly faster than the time before, and gone home in a good mood, and that seems like a reasonable way to spend an hour.

My daughter came with me last weekend. She's entered the junior run. She finished in 11 minutes and lapped me and didn't mention the sports day.

I'm counting that as a win.