Helderberg weekend park run cancelled due to rain — fourteen regulars run anyway, will not be logged, consider it ‘a moral victory’
Helderberg Basin
The Saturday park run event at a Helderberg Basin venue was formally cancelled at six-fifteen on Saturday morning via the official park run communication channels, citing weather conditions described in the notice as unsuitable for safe event operation, a decision made by the event director who said she had looked at the forecast, looked at the course and made the call that she was confident was the right one and that she stood by completely.
Fourteen participants ran the course anyway.
The fourteen, who gathered at the start line at eight o’clock in driving rain without marshals, without a timekeeper, without a finish funnel, without anyone to scan their barcodes and without the sanction of park run South Africa or its global parent organisation, completed the five kilometer course in conditions that several described afterwards as “honestly not that bad once you accepted it” and one described as “clarifying.” Their times will not be recorded. Their participation will not appear in their run histories. The event, for all official purposes, did not happen.
The fourteen described themselves, in a Whats App message circulated afterwards with a photograph of fourteen very wet people standing in front of the start sign with expressions of committed satisfaction, as committed, as people who don’t check emails before running and as the kind of people who run when it rains because the course doesn’t get cancelled just because the event does. One added a comment suggesting this should count as a PB on moral grounds. Another said she had never felt more alive. A third said his shoes were destroyed and he regretted nothing.
The official result for the event remains: no event. The fourteen remain aware of what they did. They consider this sufficient.