A rainy January Saturday morning saw another one of Carnethy’s social committee plans come to fruition. A bunch of Carnethy members and friends turned out to volunteer at Edinburgh’s newest parkrun – Holyrood parkrun. Parkrun is a free weekly 5k run that relies solely on volunteers to run their hundreds of events across the UK and abroad.
Our first budding volunteer (pre-event set-up) arrived at 8.25am in the dark and the last members left after midday. It was a successful event with over 400 runners, including 37 people doing their first ever parkrun! You can read the parkrun runner report here which includes some nice words about how having a parkrun takeover allows the core volunteers a chance to run themselves, or stay in bed!
A few of us headed over to Dynamic Earth afterwards, where parkrun volunteers and runners meet every week for a quick cuppa and a chat. There’s also the job of putting all the finish tokens back in order! We must thank RDs Ben and Jamie and Sophie (volunteer co-ordinator for that event) for excellent communication with Dee and Neil in the planning of our takeover.
Studies show that volunteering is good for your health. We encourage all our members to take up the call to volunteer for one of our races or other local events in the future to ensure a successful and sustainable running calendar. Parkrun relies on a set of core volunteers who work tirelessly in rotation to make parkrun happen weekly. They then do a call out for additional people to take on the range of roles from timekeeper to barcode scanner to photographer. We put out the call to our members to fill as many of these roles as possible and you didn’t disappoint with 17 members signing up. Thank you to everyone who gave their time and took part! Carnethies regularly volunteer at Holyrood and other parkruns, so why not give it a go?
The social committee meets quarterly to plot and plan a range of social activities for our members. We have planned the regular post-hill reps drinks, the ceilidh and other parties across the year.
Neil Gordon