Parkrun to remove course records

yup

My 9 year old son will be very sad that the age category is gone. He is regularly in the 1 or 2 position for his age.

It would be so much similar to have male/female/all and then same again with ages.

Parkrun were backed into a corner. On Twitter every happy feel good post they made was met with angry replies from angry women!

I'm a veteran parkrunner and whilst it's great its become such a wordwide success and "it's not a race", "everyone welcome", they can't ignore that for a very large number of people "it is a race"!! The stats are great for comparing with friends.

On the plus side, it's one more thing that exposures the ridiculousness of men inserting themselves in women's spaces.

Cowards

Of course it's an honour system, people could lie. But people mostly don't. The reason this was upsetting was that people were lying, from one perspective, in a way that prevented others from seeing and being able to understand their own achievement. Women not being able to think 'damn, I ran faster than every other woman that day/woman my age/woman ever'. Or that they were top three, top five, whatever.

It's a copout. I see why they've done it but they're copping out. And the usual suspects on twitter will blame - surprise! - women.

It will be interesting to see how all the people shouting down women with, “it’s not a race, it’s only your individual time that should matter to you” feel now.

That’s the thing. They don’t ask anyone for ID. You could make up your age just as easily as your sex.

However, in that case they should not issues rankings. The men’s record holder got an ad spot in the paper talking about running. Can’t remember what it was promoting but obviously the fastest woman would get the same opportunity as the fastest woman is….a man.

No special feelz must be hurt.

I wonder though how they can realistically police entries. They rely on people giving their age and sex, and if someone says they're a 40 year old woman who is going to check and tell them, "No, you're actually a man?" (Or, perhaps, "No, you're actually 29!") Remember too that race officials are volunteers.

I'm not saying that this outcome is desirable, just that I think they would struggle as they rely on people's good faith to enter the right category.

I'm wondering if it might be quite useful. Things tend to happen quicker when men are inconvenienced.

So everyone suffers rather than offend a tiny minority? Nice.

This is absolutely outraging. I really enjoy pouring over the stats of a Saturday and its nice to be able to congratulate a fellow runner on an age group cat win or a PB.

It'll be interesting to see whether the removal of the records will further increase outrage amongst runners when they realise that people like 'Lauren' Jeska still hold first female records.