Parkrunners! Parkrun survey

Exactly, non competitive.
It's open to all to run,it's not about competition. If you're wanting that there's other more suitable, actual competitive runs for your needs instead of moaning at Parkrun.

Parkrun have made it abundantly clear that they will not be adopting UKA rules, as they see themselves as a participation, not a competitive event. You're on a hiding to nowhere with this approach.

They have said that they will ditch results tables completely rather than go that route

Couldn't give a shit. Sometimes I run it, sometimes I marshal. It makes me happy. The only person's progression (or not) I care about is my own.
It is a fun community event. No need to get tied up in knots over what the occasional trans person is doing in comparison with me.

There aren't categories that you run in at Park Run though. You all just run together, men , women, teens, kids, adults....
So to me it doesn't really matter. You're not racing against anyone but yourself. You're only cheating yourself if you put yourself down as 12 when you're really 37 or whatever.

The line that it's difficult to police is nonsense to distract from the fact that they don't want to police it. On your profile you can literally switch from male to female and back as many times as you want and change how you appear in the results list. It would be the easiest thing in the world to prevent that but they choose not to.

If there were adult runners registering with a false DOB and being the first finisher in the 11-14 category each week you can bet they'd suddenly find that "policing" the events was actually possible.

It's a job for HQ, not volunteers on the ground.

Just adopt the UK Athletics rules that participants participate by sex, not gender. No separate category required. There is no "policing" required by volunteers on the ground - it's based on honesty, just as age categories are. Most people are honest. If someone is reported for being dishonest, have a procedure to deal with it, exactly as if someone had lied about their age.

The one potential issue is that ParkRuns may be targeted by TRAs upset by their decision to have sex categories, however I don't think this is likely. I have not seen any athletics, swimming or cycling events targeted, despite all their governing bodies now rigidly enforcing sex segregation.

Yes and other people changed their names to things reflecting the "bring back the stats" campaign and had them changed back.

It is not a big admin job for an RD to email HQ with concerns - they have to report other types of incidents. And it would only really be if a course/age group record were broken - nobody is going to bother checking every female result above say 25 minutes to make sure they are actually female. But if a female course record is broken and the person looks male (and despite what some MNers say, you CAN tell and "butch" women look like women, not men) a report can be made.

I think that some women had changed their names to Adult Human Female (or similar) and parkrun had deleted them.

Genuine question: what policing of names goes on?

This can't be done by volunteers at the events verifying name against ID, or indeed even parkrun HQ doing do (as there are "names" that are clearly not actual names that have been around for years and are still running).

So I was wondering if it were more a case of preventing people from registering with nicknames that contain swearing or other language widely held to be offensive (across every parkrun country, as one registration can be used internationally)

They spend time policing the names people register with, so I don't accept this as a reason for accepting unfairness for females in favour of male desires.

“Similarly it is not possible to police everyone's sex registration but where it is spotted that someone has registered in the wrong sex class it should be possible to have that corrected.“

Possible -yes. But how much extra admin (which costs money - where is that coming from?) Not to mention the argo for the poor volunteer, already giving up their own free time for the benefit of others, who has to address it - ie how should they be determining whether someone is male or female because someone else reports to them they think they’re not what they say? would make for some very difficult conversations unfair to inflict on the RDs

It’s frustrating, but I can see why parkrun wouldn’t want to get involved in having to confirm people are who they say they are. It would put a lot of people off registering if you needed ID to confirm your age etc. (although I realise this isn’t ParkRun’s official reasoning for having anyone who feels like it registering as female)

As for affecting measuring progress, it’s not a very good indicator anyway. I can often be 1st in my age category, usually up to 3rd. From the results, it’s very clear that where I am in this is dependent on who else happened to run that day - nothing to do with my own relative performance. As others have said - the age grade % is a much better measure for this.
also - as parkrun average times are increasing, which fits their stated objectives of getting more people active, an individual who remains consistent would appear to be improving against others.

The comparisons are fun (not the same as important!) whist also being totally meaningless

Thank you @Parkrunners (and other posters too!) for putting into words so clearly why this is unfair and uninclusive to women, and illogical too! Going to bookmark this thread for future use, even though I sadly don't have the survey!

To add a point as well:
There is absolutely no reason why, if they want to be more "inclusive", Parkrun could not capture both 'gender' and sex data - as long as they include the relevant opt-outs or "none" options, so people who don't believe they have a 'gender', or who prefer not to reveal their sex, don't have to enter one. They could even generate two sets of age gradings if they really wanted, one using the "gender" data (though this would be a bit meaningless, as they would be comparing race times categorised by internal feelings against records based on sex - but that's kind of what they're doing currently, anyway!) and one using the sex data for a meaningful result. So the questions would be something like:

"What is your sex (as recorded at birth)?" with options:

• Male
• Female
• Prefer not to say

• No (or "No gender identity"- I would like one that says "Don't believe in gender identity" really, but that's probably too much to ask!)
• Yes - identify as man
• Yes - identify as woman
• Yes - other/NB/whatever other options they want to include, or even "write your own"
• Prefer not to say

That would give options for everybody. Of course a few people might still lie about their sex, but at least could then be challenged on it if it was affecting the results.

I intended to distinguish between competitive sport type of running events (such as events run under athletics rules) and mass participation events, such as fun runs and parkrun.

And yes I suppose you could get into hair splitting about events which are competitive for the elite runners but mass participation for many. But the point here is that parkrun, despite being a timed event on a measured course has firmly nailed its colours to the mast that it is about mass participation (and is prepared if necessary to ditch results tables completely if that becomes necessary for that ethos)

As I said above, it's the same as age.

If an obvious youngster sets a course record in the 80-84 age category it is easy enough for the team to report it to parkrun HQ. Ok someone might knock 10- years off their age which is harder to police, but it's going to be incredibly rare.

Likewise, if an obvious male-bodied person sets a course record in a female category it is easy enough for the team to report it to parkrun HQ and ask for the record to be adjusted.

But apparently that's far too hard.

Out of interest what do you suggest parkrun do? I also agree trans women should be recorded as a separate category but I'm not sure how an organisation like park run could do it. They could add a trans option if they don't but ultimately it's self reported so it would be really hard to police.

Well that's their prerogative. Making it unfair for females who will then self exclude isn't the answer.

I had thought that parkrun results had been excluded from the Run Britain rankings (as the results are not verified) but someone told me that they were still there. That is something I think should change, because those rankings are about competitive sport

They are still there, but the times don’t count as competitive as the courses vary so much and are not necessarily accurate distance or timing. Shame as my park run PB is a minute faster than my real 5K PB.

I haven’t had a survey link.

Of course no one says they can’t. Just like no one says the women (and men) who have boycotted parkrun because of this issue can’t. But I guess if you were a card carrying trans activist trans man or woman and the rules said you couldn’t run under your identified gender then you would feel like you couldn’t take part.