On 21 December 2024, visiting Victoria Dock parkrun allowed me to join the Cowell Club.
The Cowell Club is how the specific achievement of visiting 100 different parkrun venues is known among people chasing parkrun challenges.
As always, you can use the one of the great parkrun apps to track your progress, or go old school and use spreadsheets or paper trackers. Chances are that if you are obsessive enough to get to this point, you will probably use a combination of all of them.
Parkrun tourism gets addictive and people get into it and stick with it for years for many different reasons. For me, it is a nice excuse to visit many places I would not otherwise see and explore the UK and far away countries too.
My home event is Wimbledon Common, in West London. The furthest event in my Cowell list? Presint 18 in Putrajaya, just outside Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. Pretty far, isn’t it?
Note: graphic on the right sourced from the iOS 5K app.
My parkrun Cowell Club stats
I reached 100 locations in December 2024, when I had taken part in 174 parkruns. This is probably fairly fast, with more than 50% ratio of new venues vs repeats. For a couple of years I repeated my locals very often (I also have a P-Index of 6), then caught the exploration bug.
Out of 100 locations, 91 of them are in the UK. All in England with only one of them in Wales, Y Promenad: a trip to chase the elusive Y letter in beautiful Brecon.
Until 2024, my foreign explorations were few and far between, roughly once a year. Then, several things came together in 2024 to turbocharge my foreign parkrun roster: a number of business trips ending on parkrun eve and a long holiday around Italy which, surprisingly, allowed for two different parkruns at each end. Wonder how that happened. 🙂
My foreign parkrun record ended up being:
- Italy: 4 venues
- Germany: 2 venues
- Sweden: 1 venue
- Malaysia: 1 venue
Parkrun Cowell Club: my venues
Here are the venues I have visited to build up to 100 different venues and join the Cowell Club, in chronological order. I started this blog and its related YouTube Channel when I visited venue 41, in Alice Holt. All previous events with links below were re-visits after that date. I am pretty sure the missing ones which happened to be in London or the South East will eventually get their post and video. The ones that happened to be further away, probably not. Unless someone wants to do it as a guest writer, obviously on an attributed basis. If interested, feel free to contact me.
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