Dear parkrun central team, Russ Jefferys and board of trustees,

Thank you for your letter on Wednesday last week where you explained your reasons for removing the record stats and leaderboard lists such as the first male and female finishers, the fastest 500, and all the age graded records for each local parkrun and junior parkrun event.

We appreciate the goal of making parkrun inclusive for everyone and that you believe these records have the potential to put off new participants. However, we have continued to promote the petitions to bring back the stats, because we firmly believe the majority of parkrunners want the stats back, and we do not believe these 
records are stopping people from wanting to join.

• We believe these records and lists are motivational, inspirational and show personal achievement. Many loved the stats.
• Many runners around the world found these lists fun and interesting.
• People of all ages viewed these records. Kids were really proud of both junior and 5k parkrun age records. Older runners loved seeing where they fared in age-graded tables and worked to improve in their local parkrun’s standings, or take on other records as a tourist elsewhere.
• We do not believe removing these tables makes parkrun more inclusive. Parkrun had been wonderfully inclusive for twenty years, both welcoming and friendly with these records in place. Although we can empathise that beginners or slower runners may find parkrun a challenge, it is not the stats that make it so. We do not believe removing records, lists and age-grading tables will impact their likelihood to participate in any meaningful way and they are not a barrier.
• Having a competitive element of parkrun for those who want it has always been part of parkrun since its first four years as Bushy Park Time Trial, as you said in your letter. Parkrun can be different things for different people, whether you are slow or fast. Allowing people to engage with it in a way that suits them made it inclusive. In reality, removing the stats leaves the runners that valued and used the records feeling excluded.

These changes were done without consultation or warning without offering any alternative incentives for parkrun participants and go against the spirit of the global community event that parkrun is. We would be happy to work with parkrun to find a mutually acceptable solution, such as enabling runners to continue to access course statistics but in a less prominent way.

Many of our petition contributors have also put ideas forward that we would be happy to share, such as increasing the presence of other stats that celebrate volunteering and tourism, to display in addition to the course stats.

Our two petitions now have over 18,500 signatures of ordinary parkrunners and 
volunteers around the world who would like the stats back. Slow, fast, in between, old, 
young, middle aged. We all want them back. Please listen to what we are calling for and bring back the stats!

www.change.org/bringbackthestats
www.petitiononline.uk/bring_back_access_to_australian_parkrun_performance_data

Respectfully submitted,

Will Hartley, Woking parkrun, England
Mary Taylor, Author of the Bring Back the Stats petition
Mark Purvis, Author of the Bring Back Access to Australian parkrun performance data petition
Jérôme Benhadj, East Coast parkrun, Singapore
Claire Stevens, Druridge Bay parkrun, England
Kamil Wolosewicz, Warszawa-Ursynow parkrun, Poland
Janice Whittle, North Lakes parkrun, Australia
Alexander Smotrov, Wormwood Scrubs parkrun, England
Celèste Booysen, Durbanville parkrun, South Africa
And 18,691 more parkrunners and volunteers from around the 
world.