I love stats and parkrun apps are invaluable in helping collating them. Numbers are a reflection of progress, which can be positive or negative, but it helps quantifying results and commitment and trends over time can give surprising insight on what is going on. I am very competitive, but only against myself. The journey and long and it will have ups and downs and seeing those helps planning for the future.
On top of this, the community around parkrun has unofficially come up with plenty of fun, easy, long term challenges that help with long term motivation: you have something to complete and different kind of goals to choose what floats your boat: streaks, travel, volunteering, a bit of all three.
I will write more about both quantified running and challenges, but the basis is simple: how can these things be tracked? Well, there are parkrun apps for that obviously
Official app that has not been maintained for years
Free hub for everything parkrun
Free hub for stats and achievements
Freemium hub for stats and achievements
Official parkrun appparkrun Virtual Voluteer
Official app to be used when volunteering on time keeping roles
We can divide among the two official parkrun apps and the 3 unofficial parkrun apps. I will try to give you a quick overview of their features and what I like and dislike, keen to hear any views or if I am missing some new app or some key features. At the end of the day, it depends on what everyone needs from these apps. All testing and pictures refer to the iOS version. Some pics are from my own apps, some are stock pictures found on internet
If you couldn’t care less about data and prefer enjoying your runs, give a look at my Course Reviews or for something more visual my YouTube Channel
Official parkrun app
The official app has not been maintained or updated for 7 years, but is still available for download on the AppStore. It is very basic and pretty clunky. It gives you results, basic trends, PBs and basic information on the events..
I used to keep it on my phone, until I deleted it and moved on to the more modern, unofficial ones. It is also very buggy and it tended to freeze completely every few weeks, with the only solution being to delete it and re-download it.
It’s a zombie app that should not be available for download anymore. I recommend to ignore it
parkrun Virtual Volunteer
After the pandemic, parkrun moved from the old physical scanners to app-based scanning for time keeping and started accepting virtual barcodes from phones and smart watches. This app is what is used today for this purpose.
I have never used it because when I have volunteered, I was not given time keeping roles, but it seems to work very well. Eventually, I will try it as well, but I could not write a blog about parkrun apps without at least mentioning it. parkrun survives because people decide to dedicate their time to it and allow runners to enjoy the experience, we should all volunteer sometimes as well. It is actually fun!
5K parkrunner
This free app developed by Michael Clayton has quickly become the gold standard. It offers pretty much anything you could want from it, it has a good user interface and it is actively maintained, becoming better over time.
So, what can you get from this app?
- Your barcode (scannable)
- A list of all your events, with expandable details, showing full results and result analysis
- An interactive map showing events you have been at, events you still have not gone to, NENDY (next events not done yet), upcoming cancellations
- As of April 2024, the Voronoi parkrun map feature has been added to the 5K. Finally this is available on apps as well and not only limited to desktop Chrop add-on users
- Friend connections to see results of people you follow
- Clubs (if you create or join one)
- Leagues (to compete with friends if you create or join one)
- Reviews of each event from other runners
- Planner (to pick future events ahead of time)
- Some basic running caalculators
- Running achievements
- Custom-made challenges and achievements
- Performance trends for each event and across your running history
- Volunteering history
Now, to go into a bit more details on the features that I personally find particularly useful:
Performance charts
This is pretty basic as far as running analytics go and it is something most running apps will offer, but parkrun can be a different animal from your usual training and races and this shows parkrun data only.
You will find trends covering your annual PB, time over the last few events, age grade over the last few events, pace over the last few events and historical PB events.
As you can see, my performance tanked at the end of 2022, so I have this nasty little chart telling me I have to get my crap together and start training seriously again
Running achievements
One of the main reasons to use a parkrun app. If, like me, you get motivation from completing little lists and collections that give you nothing besides the fact that you have done it, this is a life changing feature.
The achievements are updated automatically every Saturday when the event team submit your results and your profile on the app is updated.
There are 36 achievement now, from relatively well known ones to obscure ones bordering on absurd – I have 38 years because you can also easily create your owns and track progress automatically.
Achievements are usually of the ‘completionist’ kind, rather than performance related, so they tend to relate to event numbers, first letter of the event name, event location, date of the event. It makes completing events not always obvious and it can be a nice additional motivation to wake up early on a Saturday morning or even to spend a weekend abroad 🙂
At the moment, for example, if you want to complete the Alphabeteer event (run a parkrun with a name starting with all letters of the alphabet), you will need to fly abroad: in Europe there are only 6 events with a name starting with Z, but they are in Poland (3), Holland (1) and Germany (1). I got my Z in Den Hague, Holland, when I was there for a business trip on a Friday and decided to extend 🙂
Interactive map
Another little feature you find on the other apps, but 5K implements it particularly well. The dots obviously show the various events, with green dots for the one you have already been to, blue dots showing the ones you have not been to yet, red dots for events they are suspended next Saturday and orange dots for events that are suspended sometimes over the next few weeks. The map kind of becomes a completion challenge in itself 🙂
Cancellations are particularly useful for obvious reasons.
If you click on the box in the lower left corner you find your NENDY list. A list of events you have not gone to yet, sorted by distance. Distance is as the crow flies, so sometimes you might want to order differently depending on traffic and road networks, but it is a great starting point in your planning
The map comes handy in conjunction with the app’s Planner tool. That’s basically an agenda where you can pre-pick where you will go over the next few weeks or months. If you do event number based challenges, that’s particularly handy… you can sort in a way that tells you that in X weeks a particular event will give you the elusive Nelson 444 for example.
From the map, you can filter events by name, event number or part of the name (if you want to catch a ‘South’ for example)
Running Achievements
This used to be the gold standard before 5K started being improved at the pace it has been improving recently. It still is a great little app, but I’m getting the feeling 5K has surpassed it in functionalities recently. Unless you want to automatically track regionnaire achievements or international tourism achievements. In this case, this app remains the best option.
However there are still some areas where I think it offers more, so I am still using both in parallel, even if 5K is now my workhorse. What do I find here that I don’t find in 5K?
- The interface for achievements is slightly more visually pleasing, with the badges filling up as you progress
- The completed badges on your landing page are a nice thing to see
- Region-based challenges: this is something 5K does not offer, but I quite enjoy slowly working my way towards finishing all London events for example. Or eventually one day having at least 1 event in every UK region (Jordon challenge)
- A few challenges that are not on 5K
- The Voronoi map overlay, added in May 2024, is marginally better I think. The algorithm used to create the polygons more closely track what we were used to from the Chrome app
Parkrunner
The latest entrant, probably 1 or 2 years old, it has a more modern and catchy look, but it has decided to adopt a Freemium approach, ie you get some functionalities for free, but then need to pay to kill adds and get the full experience.
I understand developers need to be paid for their work, but I struggle to see the rationale for a subscription for a simple parkrun app, especially when someone like 5K and Running Achievements exist. I have not tried the premium sub mode, so maybe there are some secret features that would blow my mind, but at the moment I will probably pass. If anyone wants to let me know about crazy cool features that justify yet another subscription, please comment below
Hope you found this interesting. Please let me know in the comments if you found other interesting apps that should be added to the list or if you disagree with anything I said
Ah, sincere apologies if I have infected you with the achievements bug. As far as I know, I don’t think there is a cure for it 🙂
Really useful. O tend to use the running challenges plugin on desktop but will be checking out if a couple of these have an android version as well as life would be much easier in an app!
Thanks! The only thing I miss from the chrome plugin on desktop is the map that fills up when you do new events. But I switch a computer other than my biz one so seldom these days that I find apps much more convenient