How many folk have ticked off the full set?

And what happens when a new parkrun is launched? Each dot represents the addition of a new parkrun to the collection. Hover over to see which parkrun launched, and the number of runners who had the full set at the time. The first dot is the second run in the collection, this is to help make the charts a bit more readable

Need to check your progress?

This table shows everyone who's at least halfway to getting the full set, and which runs they still need to do. Click on a name to their events on the map.

I've been meaning to add a blog section to the site for ages. I'm not a writer so please be gentle with me…

Parkrun Geography

I sometimes get emails from the Stride and Tested community about why a particular parkrun is in this grouping and not this grouping. This use to be very easy, as they were defined by parkrun. As there is no offical parkrun geographical grouping system anymore, I needed to create a best fit set of groupings, And as

1. I'm lazy and forgetful
2. It's an emotive subject
3. I like automation

I wanted to make an automated solution. And this is how I made one.

Where are you parkrun?

The first thing I needed was a way of knowing where all parkruns are, including news ones that appear. This was relatively easy as on the parkrun website there is some metadata about all events in json format. Within this document there is lots of information including the data I cared about, country code (1 for UK), loads of versions of the event name (short, long, lowercase, localised) and the parkruns' co-ordinates* in 'Decimal degree' format . And this is really all the information I need to know where each UK parkrun is, geographically.

*These co-ordinates are for a single point not every point in the run route.

What's a region?

The parkrun 'regionnaire' regions as previously defined by parkrun HQ were:

• North East
• North West
• Yorkshire and the Humber
• East Midlands
• West Midlands
• East of England
• London
• South East
• South West
• Wales
• Scotland
• Northern Ireland
• Channel Islands*

These were not arbitrary choices (thank God) but actually a very well defined statistical Geography standard used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) called International Territorial Level (ITL-1), pre-Brexit NUTS-1. This was excellent for me because it meant that I could continue to use the same regions because it's not parkrun that made the regions but the EU/ONS and I wouldn't need to maintain them. And make people mad. Geography always seems to make people mad.

But I needed more than the names if I wanted to automate this, I needed to know, as with the parkruns earlier, where these regions actually were. And this time a single co-ordinate point wouldn't do, I needed the boundaries of these regions. ONS to the rescue again, all this data is freely available on the Open Geography portalx

*The Channel Islands are not NUTS1 regions but I added them in for completeness.

What's in a region?

Now, this is this the hard bit, I need to, automatically/computationally, tag all parkruns with their regions. This took me ages, becuase I had to learn how to do it, but the theory is pretty simple and the principle is called intersection. Basically, take the co-ordinates of a parkrun and the boundaries of a region and compare them. If the parkrun is within the boundary it's in that region, if it's not… it's not. The image below illustrates this concept, and can be seen on the 'Halfway' part of the Stride and Tested website.

Bespoke regions

The idea for Stride and Tested originated as a tiny little site to show one bespoke region which included all the parkruns I myself most frequently attended in Sheffield and surrounding areas. I've kept maintaining this bespoke region (despite moving to Glasgow) and added a couple more (as special requests) but, because they're not automated bespoke regions go out of date. This is extra maintenance that I don't want to do as part of my hobby work, so I'm going to retire any bespoke regions that can't be replicated automatically. So, '6 of the Best' will become Sheffield, and Rother Valley will disappear (to the cheers of some Millers). South Yorkshire will be errr, South Yorkshire (a NUTS-3 region - smaller than NUTS-1) and 'M606' will be Manchester (another NUTS-3 region). I'll probably do this soon and then move smaller, (NUTS-3) regions to their own special little place, and maybe take requests for new ones. LINK TO NUTS-3 REGIONS

That's blog post #1 written, will I do any more? Who knows, email me a question and I might answer it on the blog, if anyone is interested.

Ed.

Yes, my name is actually Ed, not Ron or Rhonda. I do love getting emails to Ron or Rhonda though. I just picked that alias years ago as it sounded like 'round and round the park'. I do love hearing from you and doing this volunteered work for the parkrun community so feel free to get in touch. If you email me a request or question, for context you should know I spend my own, time, effort and actual money on this, and so please reciprocate in kind. Even if you're pointing out one of my mistakes.