parkrun volunteering – Timekeeper

I might have written about it once or twice, but I have a little jog around London tomorrow, so for today I decided to skip my parkrun 5K for a parkrun volunteering stint.

parkrun is a (great) community event that can continue existing because of the many kind people who volunteer most weeks and without them many event would not exist. You don’t have to, but if you enjoy parkrun, you should try volunteering at your local event. Actually, shortly after the grim Covid months, many event HAD to cancel last minute on Friday or even Saturday morning because they could not fill their minimum volunteer requirements.

App support

The full list of volunteering roles can be found on both the 5K and the Running Achievements apps, which I have briefly reviewed alongside other parkrun apps. Specifically for volunteering, I think Running Achievements deliver a funnier experience, with dedicated achievements and little logos… but both get the gist. One thing 5K offers though is the ability to find volunteering roles for future weeks – more on that in a future post

Today was the second time I volunteered, after a first visit about 12 months ago to my local, Wimbledon Common, where I was given the role of Time Checker. Basically, I had to stand next to the timers and count runners as they came through, giving each tenth of a card that could be checked vs the distributed tokens. This helps correcting errors the timekeepers might make in recording finishers, which, as I found out today, are pretty easy to make especially when you get the human wave arriving from 26/27 minutes to 32/33 minutes.

Volunteering gives you a very clear view of what an amazing community event parkrun can be, seeing so many people who come and give their time nearly every week and get friends, camaraderie and true happiness from it.

Timekeeping

On to Timekeeping: it is done on the Virtual Volunteer app now, which is also used for token scanning. It is simple, and it is. But finishers do get crammed up around the centre of the gauss curve and it gets quite hard at that point. Also, the app gives a beeping feedback when you record a finisher, but it does not always do it for obvious reasons, so my lizard brain was often tempted to double tap.

Not a big deal though: that’s why there are always at least 2 and sometimes 3 people recording times together – you can check progress with each other, roughly track when you stopped being aligned and then the result processing geniuses have several datasets to compare and fix mistakes.

It’s not a perfect system, but it works. And the only other way would be to require everyone to have a chip and all events teams to bug reading mats… which would not work if we want to keep parkrun a free event. And remember, it’s a run, not a race! 😀

I will write more on roles and volunteering achievements, but this is it for my weekly Saturday post for now. Let me know if you have tried any specific role and enjoyed it if you want!