The Christmas weekend 2022 could go down as the fastest ever for parkrun as several elite athletes joined the fun at many of the 775 venues on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day – when parkruns are permitted one of two official extra events, the other being on New Year's Day.

The Christmas Compendium is parkrun's list of additional festive season events and a quick check by runABC found 298 parkrun events listed for Christmas Day, and this writer participated by running on Christmas Eve and volunteering to marshal on Christmas Day.

The stand-out performance of the festive weekend was Melissa Courtney-Bryant's world female parkrun record of 15:31 at Poole on Christmas Eve. The Poole AC athlete trimmed six seconds from Samantha Harrison's 15:37 set at Long Eaton on 3rd December – the world's fastest for just three weeks!

Courtney's time was achieved while finishing fifth in a very fast parkrun at Poole. The next quickest of the weekend were under-17 Innes Fitzgerald (Exeter Harriers, 16:15) at Exmouth; Elle Twentyman (Taunton, 16:17) at Eden Project; Phillipa Stone (Middlesbrough, 16:29) at Albert parkrun; Eilid Bell (Team Bath, 16:45) at Strathclyde, and Rose Harvey (Clapham Chasers, 16:54) at Dulwich parkrun – all of whom ran their fast times on Christmas Eve. 

The speediest male of the festive weekend was Tomer Tarragano (Brighton & Hove, 14:30) running at Dulwich on Christmas Eve, followed by Graham Rush (14:34) at Storeys Field, Cambridge, and Finn McNally (Brighton Phoenix, 14:36) at Dulwich.

There was an early present in the form of a PB for under-17 Ben Brown (Southampton AC, 14:38) on Christmas Day at Southampton parkrun and the next best times came as World 1500m champion Jake Wightman (Edinburgh AC, 14:39) got on the leaderboard at Bushy Park – where it all began on 2nd October 2004 – and the top six was completed by Chris Thomas (Thames Valley Harriers, 14:44) at Pegwell Bay on Christmas Eve.

This flurry of festive parkruns has taken the average finishing time for the 5K parkruns to 29:02 which has been achieved by 2,735,961 finishers who have had their barcodes scanned nearly 44 million times with an average of 16 finishes per participant, setting 7 million PBs along the way. 

There are 775 parkrun locations in the UK (1,157 including junior parkrun) and you can find your local event at the inter-active parkrun map here

Image courtesy Poole parkrun on Facebook