Bit upset about Parkrun experience today

That’s awful, I’m so sorry.

By contrast, a fast total stranger unprompted took my 8‑year‑old son under his wing and coaxed/cajoled/beasted him into a lightning‑fast PB - way beyond anything I could have helped him achieve. The whole experience lit a fire under him for parkrun and he was unstoppable for weeks.

Not sure what the lesson is. Don’t be pushy… but sometimes be pushy. 🤷‍♂️

45 minutes is a perfectly normal time and there is no way tailwalkers would have been phased by that. So if you they made you feel otherwise I sure it was accidental.

Why not volunteer to be tail walker since you're at that sort of pace anyway, quite a luxury to be able to volunteer and still do your normal pace. (I appreciate it's hard to volunteer if you don't know what your weekend plans are in advance.)

I think this thread is very useful OP. The Parkrun is overall a really positive community event, but there are points that can be taken on board here. Dh loves the ethos and camaraderie and has been encouraging me to try it. We are both autistic, I'd absolutely hate being cheered, coached and chivied and I'd certainly need an hour to finish. Others would find this encouraging. It's horses for courses.

When I tailwalk I fully expect to be taking an hour. It is often less, but I never pressure the people in front of me, I make sure to be a comfortable distance behind them so they are not feeling harassed. If I know I need to be home early I marshal or run it, I won't be tailwalking!

We get a good number of walkers at ours. We also get the speedy 16 minute racers, and everything in between.

I am sorry you had the experience you had, OP.

Please don't be a volunteer any longer!

Then you aren't a suitable walk / marshall volunteer.

If you want to be done by 10am then only volunteer for course check, set up or 1st timers talk so you're done by 9am.

Between volunteering and running/ walking, I must have been to around 400 parkrun (5k & junior) events.

Please email the director team about the tail walkers' behaviour. They're there to support, not pressure.
Personally tailwalking at typical 5k pace is not for me, therefore I leave that to someone who is more comfortable with it for everyone's benefit, and it is an easier position to fill on the roster. I've enjoyed park walking because it's more flexible on pace and it's better suited to me. I volunteer based on what time I have avaliable based on likely finishes.

I'm stunned at 45mins being considered slow. It's not slow at any of the 14 5k events that I've been to and I wouldn't expect to see any tailwalker back significantly earlier than an hour and commonly a bit past that. If I was going to have a significantly outlying time beyond that course's usual range then I'd probably give the team a head's up in advance for their planning.

This summer I've been injured and around the 35-45 min range and the participants are still coming in insignificant numbers at that point. 45mins is a brisk walk or run-walk pace, so the relaxed walkers are beyond that point. We also have monthly "5k your way" events by a cancer/ recovery charity which encourages more walkers at a gentle pace.

More walkers is better. Walking is a part of parkrun, it's encouraged with park walkers, and the long re-named tail walker role, so the more participants there are around that pace range, the better the atmosphere and the more interesting it is before the tailwalker completes.

@ShrubLover @Betterbeingdead please dont be put off Parkrun, it honestly isn’t anything but encouraging at ours.

The people on here that are moaning about it don’t even appear to be volunteers. I speak as a volunteer saying I am happy for you to take as long as you need and I know our other volunteers agree (it is mainly the same people every week).

Please give it a go.

The part about them “cheering” you to finish annoys me. Why would you try to push someone to run if they’ve been walking? Surely common sense tells you they could have some injury or issue and that pushing them might be a bad idea. Also it’s just embarrassing to have people do that if you’re the last one. I still remember people shouting at me as I came in last in a race when I was a teenager. It made me go faster but only because I found it so embarrassing 😂

I hope to go to Parkrun with my son when he’s a bit older. His school advertise it and have some connection to it.

Volunteering at the 5k event isn't for everyone. If that's your attitude, I suggest you don't put your name forward again as nobody should be made to feel that their efforts are taking too long or holding the volunteers up. If you're not prepared for it to take over an hour, don't volunteer on a Saturday.

There's always juniors on Sunday to get your volunteering fix. On average, it's over in about 20 minutes.

Yes. You (or maybe not you, but some people) could get severely injured being pushed to go faster. Even those who have never experienced sickness or injury should be aware and empathetic, and if not they should stay away from volunteer work.
If they want to walk fast, they can do that anywhere else!

I’m sorry this happened to you and I’m cross on your behalf. Definitely not in the spirit of parkrun and I’m sure your local run directors would want to know.
I ran/walked parkrun this morning in my usual 45-50 mins and had nothing but support and encouragement from the volunteers, as always.
I regularly volunteer and never mind how long anyone takes. We make sure the last finishers feel reassured that it’s ok and that they get their applause - all the more deserved as they’ve kept going for longer. No one ever grumbles or suggests that slow people shouldn’t take part - that kind of comment would be frowned on. Maybe I’m lucky that my local parkrun has a good core team who set the right tone.
There are idiots in any organisation, but I hope this one experience doesn’t put you off.

Yes this was rather my experience as a beginner runner of unbelievable slowness trying parkrun as a next step after couch to 5k. The tailwalker (jogger in my case) ran with me, said I shouldn’t use headphones, made me try to go faster than I wanted to, talked constantly to me with ‘motivational’ content, drew attention to me with lots of cheers and claps etc. I was miserably uncomfortable throughout, had incontinence problems by the end which otherwise I would have walked to avoid, and all in all I have never done a complete parkrun again. I still went to do a single loop of the course, because the main reason I went was to take and support my son, with my own fitness and progress on my own terms a secondary goal, and by dropping out after the first loop I avoided the attention and the issue with weeing myself. What really got me is the tailwalker visibly thought he’d done a great job - maybe by some lights he had - but I wasn’t there for unsolicited personal training.

I do think that volunteers should be able to say the reality of how they want to run the tail of the event to go. If they want to say that everyone needs to finish in under an hour, by all means say so - it’s not what I thought parkrun was about, but volunteers lives matter. But however they do it, arsey comments and tailgating are not ok.

At my parkrun today there were 25 people who finished in over 45 minutes, and 8 of those finished in over an hour, which I'd say is fairly typical.

At my local parkrun quite a few people take over an hour. Nobody bats an eyelid. One lady who comes to our weekly skills & drills group volunteers as a tail walker frequently but also takes part. I think her fastest time over about 7 years is about 45 mins but it's an essential part of her week & she loves the social aspect.

I think you should give it a go. The whole event is meant to be completely supportive & inclusive

You need new tech, no parkrun will measure that long!

Its worth remembering that you are inspiring others. Other women who think they cant join in because they are too slow will see you and think, we'll if she can walk it , then I can walk a bit run a bit.

Keep it up I say. And it is worth a polite email so that the message can get through to the volunteers.

But the average time for a woman age 70 to run 5k is 50 minutes, so that would exclude them - and that defeats the point of Parkrun. I know several people with terminal cancer doing Parkrun and they’re not fast either.
When I was running 5k I definitely could not do it in 45 minutes.

Some of the remarks in this thread are awful and I suspect some of them having never been near a parkrun.

I’ve done nearly 250 parkruns and today completed my 100th different event so I’ve seen lots of different parkruns.

Tailwalkers in my experience take around an hour. Sometimes more sometimes less. 45 minutes is a fast walking pace. Tailwalkers are not there to get a certain time. They are there to be last, so no one else is, or worries about being last.

Parkrun is different things to different people. Sometimes for me it’s been running a new personal best. Sometimes it’s about seeing a new place. Sometimes it’s about the community aspect. Sometimes it’s about improving and maintaining your mental health.

Everyone should be welcome at parkrun. The one the OP went to didn’t do that today. That doesn’t mean parkrun is bad or that the volunteers were bad but that one wasn’t ok today. Please do contact the run director as they need to know.

Ignore them. I used to give myself a hard time over not progressing much on my PB but I always tell myself a) I ran/walked just as far as the leaders and b) i ran/walked faster than those sat at home!

I have my 50 parkrun shirt and never did it faster than an hour. The tail runners were always lovely and encouraging and people waited for me and my friend who walked and cheered us on to run the last bit at the end

It's sad that this thread is giving people such a bad impression of parkrun. I've run over 300 of them and volunteered nearly 90 times and I think it's awesome! My local one is genuinely really friendly and inclusive, and we always have lots of people finishing in around an hour, or over an hour. It would be very unusual for us not to have anyone taking over an hour. We often have a few parkwalker volunteers too - they wear official "parkwalk" hi-viz vests. The idea is for them to encourage people to feel like it's ok to walk a parkrun. We have a few participants who use walking sticks, and a 5K walk in around an hour/1hr15 or so is a big achievement for them and we're very happy to be able to facilitate that. We get 500-600 runners most weeks and the average time is over 27 mins.

This was unusually busy today because of the presence of Joe Wickes.

I've never run it - it's a flat course, so gets faster times than other courses in Fife.

The last two on the list will be the tailwalkers, so the last Parkrunner came in at just over 1hr 12 minutes and I'm betting that no one batted an eyelid.

https://www.parkrun.org.uk/lochoremeadows/results/2026-09-05/

I am a Run Director and, if someone had any issues at all with how our parkrun was run, or how our volunteers conducted themselves, I'd want to know so we could address it in the future. We always brief our tail walkers (and all volunteers) on their role so our tail walkers know to never hurry the back participanrs and follow at their pace, hanging back if necessary. The way the tail walkers behaved at your parkrun today wasn't appropriate, so hopefully if you flag this up in a polite email the event run directors will know to brief their tail walkers more carefully in the future.

45 minutes is fast walking speed for 5k. Their behaviour, moaning about the time, was quite frankly ridiculous. They obviously don't understand the parkrun ethos. Hopefully it will never happen to you again, but if it does I think there's nothing wrong with turning round and saying something like "would you mind dropping back a bit please? I can't go any quicker than this today". If they have an issue with a polite request like that, that's a them problem as it would be a thoroughly reasonable request. If they wish to push on, they should try the 'park walker' role rather than tail walker, where it's their responsibility to remain at the back and support participants to get around safely at their own pace. They could have easily been in for a 60 minute+ walk today, as tail walkers, and they should have been prepared for that. That's the norm. Most parkruns take at least 55 minutes to finish. To be over in 45 minutes is very unusual now since the launch of the park walk movement, and rightly so. Walkers have just as much right to enjoy parkrun at their own pace as runners do.