Pace Oddity - GoodGymxFulhamPalaceparkrun

An incredible 38 GoodGym'ers helped spread the word about GoodGym as they volunteered at Fulham Palace's 300th event!

Wow! What a HUGE GoodGym takeover! It's been months in the making and my word did Red Thunder deliver as 38 GoodGym'ers turned out to lend a hand at parkrun, while also promoting GoodGym! On the hottest day of the year so far, a sea of red t-shirts turned up to help with the pre-event set-up, pacing, timekeeping, token sorting, number checking, funnel managing, photographer, the lot! Most of the roles were filled by GoodGym'ers, and the RD was our very own Jonny, normally found RD'ing at Beckenham parkrun!

Today's Fulham Palace parkrun event was a special one, it was their big 300th event celebration!...although we'll forever remember it as the "big double zero". To mark the occasion some big blue balloons 3-0-0 were attached to the regular board asking for volunteers, unfortunately though the 3 balloon decided to take flight before the start of the run leaving the two 0 balloons behind. Not only was it the "big double zero" but it was also National Armed Forces Day. Their were half a dozen soldiers from The Royal Yeomanry, the senior reserve light cavalry regiment of the British Army at the parkrun to help out and promote both what they do, and the importance of the day.

Despite the slight hiccup of the 3 balloon and a few last minute alterations to the location of the finish funnel, everyone was ready to go, donning either the official yellow high viz jackets or their blue pacers bibs. With final pre-event preparations underway, Kate, Andrew and Jason got to work chalking up the best finish funnel masterpiece that Fulham Palace ever seen, check out the photos!

With all the volunteers in place, the runners gathered round for the briefing. Armed with a megaphone, Jonny began the briefing by first handing over to Hugo from The Royal Yeomanry before continuing on with his announcements and milestone shoutouts, and one shoutout for GoodGym!

Briefing complete it was time for the start! Due to Fulham FC's stand works the course has been temporaily changed, including the start position, which caught out the naughty runners who didn't attend the briefing. But thanks to a quick thinking, Johnny Wren, he managed to round-up the small group of runners waiting at the old start line just before the off! The timekeepers, Kate and Ana had assumed their positions with Jonny at the start line and with some perfect co-ordination of "Go" the stopwatches began and the runners set-off.

Those that weren't pacing cheered and clapped on all the runners as they came round to complete their first lap before taking up their positions. As the runners came round the complete their last lap of the course there were lots of red sweaty faces, but also lots of smiles! Due to the new course route being slightly shorter than the 5km many of the pacers came in earlier than they had anticipated and had therefore turned to running backwards towards the finish line, encouraging on the runners behind them that they had been pacing.

As the final parkrunner came in with tailwalker, Jason everyone lined the finish funnel to cheer and clap them in, what a lovely way to end! All that was left was the closedown, token sort and most importantly, enjoy the GoodGym cake made my Helen and the coffee and teas in the sun on the Fulham Palace lawn. Perfection! A job fantastically done by all.

Thank you so much to everyone for coming along, hope you had fun! Don't forget parkrun relies on volunteers to keep the events going so do try and volunteer when you can, and look out for other GoodGym parkrun takeovers in the future! Hope you have a lovely rest of your weekend.