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Nov 2019
3:53pm, 18 Nov 2019
18,961 posts
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DeeGee
Mountains of joy, you say?
I've got whole groups organising hundred-person parkrun socials without me, going on touristing excursions without me when I'm RD leaving me with no experienced volunteers to choose from, and extolling on social media how their discovering parkrun is the best thing to happen to them, posting photos with most of the other members of the core team, except me.
Meanwhile I see runners from our event touristing, with apricot shirts with our event's name on, and they, genuinely, have no idea who I am.
So yes, I'm enjoying everyone else's mountains of joy, anonymously, and without any kind of feedback unless its a member of the public with a complaint or an ubertourist telling me how to organise a parkrun.
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Nov 2019
3:58pm, 18 Nov 2019
26,009 posts
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HellsBells
I had one of those übertourists this week. I didn't tell him whatbI thought he could do with his "feedback", I merely smiled through it, thanked him at the end and failed to listen to a single word
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Nov 2019
3:59pm, 18 Nov 2019
18,962 posts
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DeeGee
Did he summon you to him at the end for a debrief?
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Nov 2019
4:02pm, 18 Nov 2019
68,076 posts
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Gobi
Hey Larks and others
I try not to engage much on fetch these days, in fact I try not to read the forum but actually this thread is a better resource on parkrun than parkrun due to the honest nature of the people who contribute here and for that I thank you all.
Larks, I am not having a go at you or looking for a major argument so please do not take below as a personal attack on you.
Having been around parkrun since there was only 1 and having been heavily involved in setting up and running 3 I believe I have a little knowledge on the subject matter even if I am now one of the people who rarely runs.
Back in the early days runners set up parkruns because we wanted a "race" near us, this was before PC, evangelism and health and safety went mad. IE. we didn't need a lot of volunteers and even then it was a dedicated handful who made it happen. Thanks to cones, signs and enthusiasm with people doing more than 1 job, 2 people could make an event, obviously as numbers rose so did the need for volunteers but quite often this involved cajoling friends to skip one or jog and clear down the course. Anyone from before 2010 knows what I am talking about. Getting volunteers has always been hard and now you go to events and they have 20 people son a roster and still complain they are short of bodies. In some ways the mentality of the volunteer has also changed.
I know people who have done 500 parkruns and volunteered less times ever than I have run this year (13 times I believe).
The clue will always be in the word and some people take that word 100% at its value.
There is no point trying to model something you can never enforce.
Even threats of cancelling an event these days will not get a non volunteer to volunteer, parkrun is so everywhere he/she will just open the page and select another parkrun.
Lets face it, some people do parkrun with a pure simple goal of collecting different ones and claim not to have a home parkrun. So why would they volunteer?
It will always be core, core and more core plus sporadic helpers so why worry, if you lose a few parkruns along the way due to a lack of helpers maybe there wasn't enough desire for the parkrun in the first place.
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Nov 2019
4:07pm, 18 Nov 2019
966 posts
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Nessie
My brain isn't wired that way, larkim (despite being an accountant), but from Elliot Line's statistics page, there are roughly 10 runners per volunteer every week across all parkruns give or take. If we all rotate, 1 volunteer stint per 10 runs wouldn't seem unreasonable.
(Nothing to do with me being on 10/96 at all, no siree  )
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Nov 2019
4:19pm, 18 Nov 2019
9,500 posts
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larkim
(Gobi - I'm not the sensitive type Plus my volunteer ratio is appalling - 5 in 154 runs, so I'm really in no position to comment on volunteering - though without the foundations you and others set years ago, it wouldn't be the (imperfect) thing it is today!!)
I tend to steer clear of the "should you volunteer" debate because I can hardly put myself out there as a paragon of virtue! I'm in the camp of "I do other stuff with my volunteer time that is equally socially beneficial", IMHO, so I'm quite happy to use / abuse parkrun for my own ends, whilst still having a moral nag in the back of my head that I should endeavour to volunteer more. There'll come a time in my life when I will.
I'm just curious about the maths (I'm in the same trade as you Nessie, but I reckon I need an actuary's mind to go down those sorts of stats). I know the proportion of volunteers to runners is about 10%, but I can't quite get my head around how it would fit together if a precise (and completely theoretical, unusable and largely irrelevant) optimisiation of running / volunteers was modelled.
Clearly, if you've got 50 people locally who want to turn up ever week, and are happy to volunteer one in every 5 events you get 10 people volunteering and 40 people running- but life is not that simple!
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Nov 2019
4:20pm, 18 Nov 2019
33,266 posts
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HappyG(rrr)
1 in 10 is always the ratio that I thought "reasonable". Mind you, I was the one suggesting enforcement. Well, cajolement. First sanction would be can't get milestone t-shirt unless you volunteered 1 in 10. Next would be no time recorded!
But I was told to wind my neck in, and I think I got the message. There are some people who can't volunteer for reasons that I may not see. And not allowing them to run or be recognised for it, is too harsh.
And it's not those people that I would be trying to cajole. It's the twits who run 100 parkruns or tour dozens of parkruns and haven't helped at a single one and then post brazenly on Farcebook, Instamilk or YouToob and think it's praise worthy. Anyhoodle. Back in my box! G
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Nov 2019
4:26pm, 18 Nov 2019
18,963 posts
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DeeGee
Very quick question about Highbury Fields.
I'm staying in Islington on Friday night (next week) with the wife. Depending on factors, I might be able to get up to Highbury Fields (but no others). Ironically, we're at a gig at the Garage the night before.
It's just five tarmac laps, isn't it? It should be straightforward enough to jog there from the Hilton Islington, jog round and jog back before brekkers, shouldn't it?
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Nov 2019
4:28pm, 18 Nov 2019
68,078 posts
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Gobi
HG- back in the day when there were league tables you couldn't win the points league without doing 3 volunteers. It was dropped as it's not fair to force people to volunteer.
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Nov 2019
4:32pm, 18 Nov 2019
968 posts
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Nessie
There's never going to be a perfect answer, because for very small runs, you still need a timer, a scanner and probably a couple of marshalls, even if there are only a handful of runners (although self scanning could work). And different courses need different numbers of marshalls depending on number of laps, places where wrong turning could be taken, etc.
G, what about the people who *only* volunteer. Should we make them run? ;). It's a tough one - no-one can know everything about someone else's life, so I don't think sanctions could (or should) be the answer at a given ratio. But I'm sure a lot of us know someone who has loads of run credits but never volunteer, and complain when things aren't quite "right".............
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