Plenty of parkrun. Why no parkbike?

Road or off-road, don’t care. Surely there’s as much of a demand for this as the running version?

There is.

It’s called a bike club.

Like parkrun with with added politics.

And team jerseys.

The runs don’t need much distance and can be all on smooth tarmac or tracks. Bikes need a lot more distance or more gnarr which isn’t easy to do on a regular basis.
Running is slow and relatively safe, bikes are faster and would be quite dangerous if 500 turned up which is pretty often in ParkRuns.

The equivalent is the Saturday morning shop/group ride, plenty of them around the country.

If they were the equivalent to a parkrun, there’d be 100+ riders right from an XC racing whippet to your grandma on her 3 speed shopping bike, complete with Jack Russell in the basket. My local parkrun has 250 people regularly it seems, the first one of the year had 535 people running… 😮

Something along those lines has started in Southampton recently on Saturdays iirc, details on “Southampton Cyclists” Strava/Facebook pages.

Start one up then.

sky ride I guess was as close as it gets?

Running is slow and relatively safe, bikes are faster and would be quite dangerous if 500 turned up which is pretty often in ParkRuns.

Sportives are pretty close aren’t they and have masses of people. I live right next to the route of the Wiggle New Forest sportie which had 561 people in 2019. It becomes fairly chaotic on the roads as the normally impatient drivers start blowing fuses and driving very dangerously doing anything to overtake. I make sure I am cycling in other direction/no where near them.
Wouldn’t want to see that every weekend.

Sportives are pretty close aren’t they and have masses of people. I live right next to the route of the Wiggle New Forest sportie which had 561 people in 2019. It becomes fairly chaotic on the roads as the normally impatient drivers start blowing fuses and driving very dangerously doing anything to overtake. I make sure I am cycling in other direction/no where near them.
Wouldn’t want to see that every weekend.

In the spirit of parkrun, it wouldn’t be on roads.

Parkrun is very much a grass roots event, any one can take part. If you were to apply that to cycling, given that most bike owners in Britain have either a hybrid or mtb shaped bike, it’d make far more sense to have it on paths, within the confines of say, a park?.

Hence the name.

Our local park run is in a country park, think there were 300+ runners yesterday.

In that particular location, I reckon you could link up the paths and bridleways to make a 4-5 mile loop on reasonably well surfaced tracks. I doubt it would attract as many riders as parkrun gets runners, maybe 100 max.

The issue would be the increased speed of bikes on shared use paths. But if it wasn’t timed like parkrun is, that may remove some of the incentive for speed, and any tossers doing it for speed could be named and shamed. But a ParkBimble ™© might be an option

Personally, I’m too busy feeding the pigeons, and sometimes the sparrows.

Personally, I’m too busy feeding the pigeons, and sometimes the sparrows.

You must have a sense of enormous wellbeing

Do also remember that parkrun has markings and volunteer marshalls.

Marking a 10, 15, 30km course for bikes is a totally different proposition to 5km, even if you did multiple laps.

Also, speed of bikes and varied surfaces means a need for better riding skills than most riders poses. Many more accidents in my view.

Then you also need far more volunteers for longer courses and more chance of accidents.

Lastly, you need a Semble to fund the core costs initially.

There was talk originally of this being a regular (more than the once a year that it is) event, I guess disruption and organisation prevented it. A real shame because it is really popular:

Cycle Sunday – Home Page

https://www.letsride.co.uk/

We go to the Leeds one regularly, it’s great.

Sort of like a cycling club? Membership fees for the year are about the cost of a coffee and cake in london, and pay for……erm…..not much.

But you do get a 100-150km ride every sunday.

The beauty of parkrun is that it’s not a club.

Inclusive
No daft rules
Friendly
Not cliquey

So, pretty much not like a bike club weekend ride. 🤣

Sort of like a cycling club?

You’ve either never been a member of a cycling club, or never done a parkrun 😆

The beauty of parkrun is that it’s not a club.

Inclusive
No daft rules
Friendly
Not cliquey

So, pretty much not like a bike club weekend ride. 🤣

Exactly.

there’s one in London- Critical Mass or something.

I wondered if there was a market taking a bit of zwift group rides, a bit of garmin online routes and a bit of strava beacon and mashing them together.

A featured group route of the week of say 20 miles that is advertised to a category of rider like on zwift using a publically available route like on Garmin connect. The ride starts at a given time and place and a strava beacon like technology shows you where the ‘train’ is. You use the app to rendezvous with the train as it goes past your joining point of choice and stay as long as you want before leaving. The ‘train’ goes around the route two or three times throughout the morning and you stay for as much or little as you want.

App tells you who you have been riding with and you could use that to make local friends and go for rides at other times.

Oman event director at my local parkrun and answered this a while ago. As a start:
Terrain. Pretty much anyone can run on any surface. To attract grass routes entrants you’d have to run a bike event on very easy terrain that’s make it very dull for experienced participants.
Speed. A fast runner is still slow enough to be safe on open parkland. A fast cyclist, doing say 20mph on a park isn’t safe as you never know who will walk across the path.
Space. Bikes take up a lot of space and need more space between them for inexperienced participants. You can’t squeeze 300 cyclists into a tight and not expect loads of crashes.
Marshals. We need 25 volunteers to run a single loop 5k course. You’d need a longer course for cycling, 10 k minimum and so you’d need a lot of volunteers.
Crashes. Runners occasionally fall and turn an ankle. Cyclists at speed crash hard and break bones. So you have a need for trained people.

I’m not convinced it doable, as you can see!

I think we are all assuming that ParkBimble™ would be aimed at and attended by fast cyclists. I’d see it as an opportunity for new and occasional riders to get out with others.

Our club has led “cycle for health” rides for the local authority on Monday nights for the last year. No more than 10 miles, pretty much all off road on well surfaced tracks and trails, canal paths and bridleways. No drop policy, average speed maybe 9mph.

Attendance has regularly hit double figures, even now we’re in the dark muddy winter. Big range of riders in terms of bikes, health and ability, mainly women. Quite a few have moved up to the slightly longer and faster club ride on the same night.

I think we are all assuming that ParkBimble™ would be aimed at and attended by fast cyclists. I’d see it as an opportunity for new and occasional riders to get out with others.

But that’s a guided ride and part of the reason parkrun is so popular is that you can push yourself and go faster. And also that you can attend whether you do 5k in 15 minutes or 50.
Also, you’re talking about taking 10 people out, even the smallest parkrun gets 10 times that, to be a grassroots movement you need lots of people doing it.
There’s no question that small guided rides are a great way to get people into cycling but they won’t provide the volume of new people that parkrun does for runners.

Our club has led “cycle for health” rides

Whereas my experience of bike clubs is almost almost active resistance to leisure or practical cycling. If it isn’t lycra and ‘fast group’ just to let you know how slow you are, the few who ‘lead’* club bits don’t want it.

* I don’t mean the formal leadership, I mean the hijacking of culture and rides.

The point I was struggling to make is that while a ParkRun scale bike event isn’t practical, a smaller scale entry level event might be possible.

Agree with comments about most cycle clubs. I was lucky when our local club formed, I’d just started leading social rides for Fat Lad at the Back, went along to one of the new club’s social rides, and the following week found myself sat in their committee meeting helping sort out how they would offer grassroots beginner friendly rides. Two years and 400 members later, we were runners up in Cycling Weeklys Club of the Year for 2019.

It’s about the attitude at the top.

Cyclo cross

Fat Lad at the Back

For a beginner, who knows little of cycle sport and culture, that phrase is dergatory and off-putting. Poor choice of brand imo.

Screw that, most parkruns I marshall at in the local area are replete with club runners who get impatient or ill-tempered with the ordinary bods just getting a little exercise.

It’s a crappy ego boost for those who have something seriously lacking in their life. So no doubt a bike equivalent would be exactly the same.

Be a good thing for kids though. 4 to 8 year old ish.

There’s nothing that really corresponds to parkrun in that transitional area of being a proper timed race, but still casual and completely accessible.
Think you need to either do a real bike race, but one with a grassroots feel that emphasises inclusivity (cross as mentioned above is good for this), OR you get together with your mates and run proper local races on the DL if you have an appropriate location – basically some waste ground where no one’s going to bollock you for doing a few laps of a summer’s evening. These can be superb but obv not without risk – all it takes is for one self-serving dickhead to turn up and you can have problems.

Matt – I’m assuming that’s a Dragons Den reference 🙂

To attract grass routes entrants

The target market is cyclocross riders?

2 additional issues I can foresee, in addition to those above.

For the faster half: most occasional recreational joggers can grasp the concept of pacing themselves by the ‘feel of it’ and their own maximum speed, after the first 100m or so there is very little overtaking at a park run, compared to the number of participants.

Adding drafting and the ability to rest while still moving at a decent clip by coasting or soft pedalling and the first few km is going to look like the sprint finish at the end of a grand tour stage. Complete with people being run into the fences. After the mid pack guys have dropped off or crashed, there will be a 25 mph pace line lapping the park and screaming for dog walkers to make way.

For the slower half: it may seem simple to us, but other than those that live within a km or so of the start, how are they getting their bikes to the event? If a 15km cycle in the park is a struggle to you (the equivalent of the half-walk-half-jog parkrunners), you wont even consider cycling to the start. That same person also thinks removing a wheel to fit it in their car to be a major mechanical undertaking, and likely does not have a T5 or a four bike Thule roof mount system ready to go.

Be a good thing for kids though. 4 to 8 year old ish.

As someone mentioned above, you want Cyclocross! In many parts of the country (especially up here in Yorkshire), Cyclocross is very popular and is especially good at catering for kids, even those toddling round on balance bikes. It’s a great way to get out, make friends (IME very little of the normal club politics surfaces at CX), get an intro to competitive cycling and, for the kids, meet a whole load of like-minded friends. In fact, we often describe it as “a kids social club with occasional cycling”.

Oddly (for an MTB forum anyway!), I’d actually recommend CX over MTB for getting kids into early racing. We found that our local events were much bettered geared for younger kids and more accessible, from a geographic standpoint anyway – MTB races are often held in the middle of nowwhere where CX tends to be held in schools and parks.

Of course, if they enjoy it they may then want to join a club, go out on road rides, start circuit racing, get track accredited….it’s a slippery, skinny-tyred slope!

They run one near Norwich:

Park Pedal

There was an article this week that showed that 65% of people are to scared to ride reguarly on the road. I think a regular event where people can ride in safety away from the road is a good idea really, gain the confidence to ride properly.

TBH though, there’s nothing stopping you.

Name a trail center

Nominate a start time

One lap up/down the closest fire road hill to spread people out and then a lap of the trail. If you did that at Swinley for example it’s about a 20 minute lap if you were redlining the blue route.

Job jobbed.

Screw that, most parkruns I marshall at in the local area are replete with club runners who get impatient or ill-tempered with the ordinary bods just getting a little exercise.

It’s a crappy ego boost for those who have something seriously lacking in their life. So no doubt a bike equivalent would be exactly the same.

This is why cycling clubs have a fast, brisk, steady, social, very social, slow and umpteen other groups. The fast group is dedicated to it’s passive aggressive no-drop policy (no one get’s left behind but you’re not meant to be enjoying it much at the back either), the social group is dedicated to finding a reasonably priced beans on toast.

Screw that, most parkruns I marshall at in the local area are replete with club runners who get impatient or ill-tempered with the ordinary bods just getting a little exercise.

It’s a crappy ego boost for those who have something seriously lacking in their life. So no doubt a bike equivalent would be exactly the same.

Must be a geography specific issue, does your area have more than it’s fair share of fuds?.

I’ve ran 12 different parkrun venues, all over Scotland, and never experienced that. I’m not fast, but at parkrun I’ll be nearer the business end than the back, so see most of what’s going on, and I volunteer locally, and run as a pacer too.

I’ve organised a ‘cross race in a Yorkshire park for ten years… And I’ve just given up – mostly due to the hassle and expense. I didn’t mind organising a volunteer-run event where I never earned any money, but I did object to having to pay for the privilege…

If you run your event completely off the tarmac in a park, it’s going to cut up, get muddy, discourage newcomers and annoy the ‘friends of the trees/park/pitch’n’putt. Whereas if you run it mostly on tarmac, you can expect every dog walker for miles around to cut across your course, ‘because they walk their dog there every Sunday’ – despite the signs you’ve put up for the previous month (and reapplied every week because they get ripped down). And if you leave the paths muddy, expect a £200 bill from the council for cleaning them after your event.

There seems to be a completely different attitude to running vs cycling among your usual park goers. We have a cross country run in the park which uses parts of the park that I’ve been told to keep off, which doesn’t need to submit its detailed course map and risk assessment a month in advance and which appears to just be accepted by the locals, whereas I had all sorts of complaints and letters to the local paper.