The long-term effect of the coronavirus pandemic on parkrun participation: an interrupted time series analysis – BMC Public Health

Engaging in regular physical activity is linked to a decreased risk of developing numerous non-communicable diseases [11], along with notable reductions in depression and anxiety [31], as well as an increase in overall productivity [9]. However, a significant portion of the population falls short of recommended activity levels [13] and there is socioeconomic inequality in leisure time physical activity levels [1, 3, 19]. Elevating population-wide physical activity has the potential to improve public health and wellbeing and to reduce healthcare pressures and expenditure [17].

parkrun (written with a lowercase ‘p’) is a charity which organises and supports volunteer-delivered weekly 5 kilometre running and walking events (parkruns) in local communities. parkrun is widely considered to be a successful public health intervention (e.g. [33]), with over 750 events in the UK and a weekly attendance in the hundreds of thousands, many of whom were not physically active prior to participating in parkrun. Participants who complete the 5 kilometre course are given a token at the finish-line, which they are invited to scan, along with their unique parkrun ID number (barcode), to link their result to their personal parkrun profile. The vast majority do so. This allows participants to keep a record of all of the events they have participated in, but also provides parkrun with a rich dataset of the 9 million parkrun registrants worldwide.

parkrun participation is associated with improved self-reported fitness and mental wellbeing [16, 26] and brings improvements in social capital to the hosting community via volunteers and networks formed around parkrun [32]. parkrun has the capacity to improve physical activity levels in participants, particularly as many did not meet current physical activity guidelines prior to participating in parkrun [4, 15].

parkrun also has the potential to reduce the inequalities in physical activity present in England [23] by promoting physical activity in deprived groups [15], which is a key aim of Sport England’s ‘Uniting the Movement’ strategy [24]. However, previous research has shown that more socioeconomically deprived communities had lower parkrun participation rates than less deprived communities, despite living closer on average to events [20, 22]. Increasing parkrun participation in lower socio-economic groups is a central aim of parkrun, and geospatial analysis has helped to inform the locations of new events in order to achieve more equitable access and to help improve participation in more deprived communities [18, 21].

The coronavirus pandemic had wide ranging effects on general physical activity levels [27]. Studies suggest that these effects continued beyond the pandemic period [23, 29] and particularly negatively impacted those of lower socioeconomic position which may lead to a lasting increase in socioeconomic inequality in physical activity levels [5, 23].

parkrun was profoundly impacted by the pandemic. All parkrun events in mainland England were paused from 18th March 2020 until 24th July 2021 when events began to reopen in accordance with the UK Government’s roadmap out of lockdown [30]. Initial high-level data from parkrun suggests that weekly participation in the months following the return of parkrun was substantially lower than before the pandemic. Further, a study looking at specific parkrun events in Scotland showed that attendance in the year after the return to parkrun was 13% lower than the year before the pandemic [7].

Based on this evidence, we hypothesise that the hiatus in parkrun events may have had a negative effect on parkrun participation and, as observed for other physical activity [5, 23], that this impact may be larger in communities of lower socioeconomic position. To test this hypothesis, we use interrupted time series analysis to quantify the immediate impact and change in growth of parkrun participation following the pandemic controlling for the pre-pandemic trend in participation and confounding factors such as seasonality. We go on to quantify the loss in the number of parkrun finishers associated with the pandemic for the period from March 2020 to February 2023 by comparing observed data to estimated participation in the absence of the pandemic.

The results of this study will provide an insight into the long-term effect of the pandemic on a successful mass participation community level physical activity event and may add to the body of evidence on the long-term implications of different courses of action in future pandemics. Importantly, this study considers the impact of the pandemic as a whole and does not aim to quantify the effects of specific policies, behavioural shifts or the response of parkrun UK.