Is it a horse? No, it's...

At the finish

... a parkrunner!

Today I made good on an intention formulated more than a month ago, namely to join the York parkrun. My resolve to do this was strengthened by a half-promise I made at the end of the SRC run on Tuesday, when they were explicitly asking as many runners as possible to come this Saturday, which was to be the second anniversary.

Parkrun advertises itself as "free, weekly, 5km timed runs around the world". (Never mind that around the world is 40,000km.) The York edition takes place every Saturday 9:00, at the Knavesmire horse race course. You run around the track one and two thirds time, making for 5km in total. I got there a bit late, especially given that I did not know exactly where to go, but fortunately hundreds of people had shown up so all I had to do was follow them. Even more fortunately, the start was not 9:00 sharp or I would probably have missed it. Instead, there was a short speech and some prizes to celebrate the anniversary; but then we were off.

Knavesmire in operation

The venue made this very special. You will have by now calculated that the race course must be about 3km in circumference, quite large really. We ran on a service road along the actual race track, which was a good thing given the muddy state of the grounds. (I'm sure the name, Knavesmire, is no coincidence.) The group was very mixed, both in gender and in age - from 10 to 70. After a minute or so the line was spreading out: the real runners had distanced themselves from amateurs like myself and indeed most of the crowd. After that it was a matter of keeping up speed, occasionally overtaking or being overtaken. It was very funny being passed by a runner pushing a pram, with a 6-months old baby sleeping its way through it all.

They have an intriguing way to record the time of all participants. At the finish there is a volunteer stopwatching everyone's time as they pass the line, but this is not at that moment connected to your person. Instead you are given a barcode token ten meters down the line, and this is then scanned in even further down the line in combination with your own barcode (which you have received when you signed up online, and should have printed out and taken with you). Finally, some hours later, the ranking is published online: see here for today's results (pay special attention to position 192). What I haven't quite figured out is how they eventually connect up the finishing times with the runners. The only thing I can imagine is that the tokens are handed out in the same order in which the times have been recorded; but then you have to know this ordering. The scanning is done by several volunteers in parallel, so at that moment any connection to the recorded finishing times is certainly lost.

I plan to find out how they do this exactly, but whatever the answer, they certainly have their digital support in good working order. Very much unlike the York Sport Village, where you can only book classes by phoning in. In fact, I haven't yet related the following story: just after I had become a member of the Sport Village, I could enter the facilities with my wristband but not the changing rooms. At first I thought this was a temporary glitch and I just tailgated behind other people entering; but when it persisted I inquired. It turned out I had been registered as a professor, and this meant I was neither male nor female. How's that for a database design?

Aladdin and the Twankeys

This was a long story about an event lasting less than one hour! I did have activities planned for the rest of the day. To start with, somewhat madly, I had booked a body pump session at 11:00. I survived that, but only at the cost of having to take a nap later in the day. The only other thing that really needed to be done was to get tickets for the pantomime planned next week with Floris - Aladdin and the Twankeys, not the one I went to with Elise. The York Theatre Royal is another of those places that don't have their digital act together, if you live abroad then you can't book online. They barely had any tickets left: I got second balcony, back row. Hope the view is OK.