Why are councils blocking parkrun?

There are few public health interventions as successful as parkrun. It wasn’t set up as a public health intervention, which may be one of the reasons it has worked so beautifully. The first one was just a group of friends doing a 5k time trial in London’s Bushy Park. But in the years since that first event in 2004, parkrun has spread across the world. It went from being a largely middle-class event for people who already considered themselves runners to being a part of many communities, deliberately expanding into deprived areas and trying to get a slower average time for participants completing the course, because that meant it wasn’t just reaching established runners and fit types. No one finishes last as at each event there is a ‘tail walker’, a volunteer who walks behind everyone else and keeps up morale.