My name is Chris Cutforth. I'm a senior lecturer in sport development at Sheffield Hallam University.

On the 2nd of October 2015, I interviewed Tom Williams, Park Run's UK director,

during which we explored the development of Park Run over the past 10 years

and how their unique approach to strategy has enabled park run to become the hugely

successful organisation that it is today. The purpose of this, Tom, and my students, the purpose of

this interview is really just to explore the park run approach to strategy. So with that in mind, Tom, could you perhaps for the benefit of the

students, because some of them will be familiar with park run, but quite a lot of them won't,

could we start by, could you just tell us in a nutshell what Park Run is all about?

Yes, absolutely. Can I do that in a nutshell? I don't know if I've ever done that in a nutshell.

I'll give you a very, very brief history and we can delve into the detail, I'm sure, as we go.

But very quickly, Paul Sinton-Hurit, our founder, invited his friends to run a 5K laparound bushy in london or october the second 2004 um 13 people

turned up with their five volunteers and those 18 people we call the park run pioneers and they ran a

a free timed 5k run absolutely not a race it was kind of against the clock and against yourself

back in 2004 that That was 11 years,

11 years ago today, in fact. I think it's the second October today. I think it is.

Oh, really? Yeah, I think that might be a pretty good time. It's a nice coincidence.

Yeah, I think so. And so the idea, Paul's idea then was he just wanted to create for his local community the opportunity for people for runners to come together once a week and run for free uh against the clock if they

wanted to with their friends if they wanted to run with a dog run with your kids whatever but have

this free weekly time run in bushy park in london um it grew um fairly gradually and it took a year to get 100 runners. After a couple of years,

they thought they were getting a bit busy. I think they had about 250 runners a week by that

point and it was still this one little free weekly time run every single week at Saturday at 9 o'clock,

same time, same place. You just turn up run and got your time later that day via email. They started two more in London to try and ease the pressure. Didn't ease the pressure, of course, because that's not what happens in Park Run and we can talk about that later as well. It just made everybody busier. And then in 2007, I came along. I was working at the University of Leeds as a lecturer in sport and exercise science, and we were looking for a way to engage the students of the community with volunteering in sport. I'd seen what Paul was doing in London, rang him up, said, can we copy what you're doing? He said if you become the fourth event, well, the fourth part of an event in the first one outside London, then we'll give you web space, we'll give you your laptops, we'll give you timers, we'll train you how to do it, we'll do everything for you for nothing, and we'll support you forever. So we became, it was obviously a too good offer to a few, so we became the fourth part-run event in the world. That was eight years ago this weekend. If we fast forward to today, there are now, I think, 718 part run events in the world.

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