BETTY'S BAY PARKRUN 29 APRIL 2023

The African meetup of parkrun World Tourists was hosted here last Saturday (29 April 2023) at the local parkrun held here weekly in the Harold Porter Botanical Gardens.
“We have chosen Betty’s Bay to celebrate our parkrun world tourist day because we wanted to show the international visitors what a beautiful country we have got and what better place than the Overberg and the most beautiful botanic garden I have been to,” commented the African representative of the parkrun World Tourist group, Leighanne Imbert.
According to Leighanne, similar meetups were also held in four other parts of the world - New Zealand, Singapore, Europe and Canada.
Apart from Cas Castleton, founder of parkrun World Tourist Group, at least seventeen other overseas visitors and many more locally based parkrun World Tourists attended the meetup.
When starting up the group four years ago, Cas thought he will be joined by 200 other Parkrunners, but the group now has already 1800 members.
To become a parkrun World Tourist, you must have done parkruns at at least twenty different venues and four different countries. Differently coloured hats indicate how well travelled you are, starting off with orange for twenty plus and yellow for hundred plus. Blue indicates that you are in the executive.
Never so many green parkrun t-shirts earned for completing more than 250 parkruns, have been seen congregated at the Betty’s Bay Parkrun. Amongst them local 250er, Frikkie Jansen van Rensburg, who will hopefully be joined soon in this category by another local participant, Stewart Pooley, kept our flag flying high by improving on his personal best time here.
The World Tourists have their own set of achievements, called after the first member achieving them. A Hoffman is for doing fifty parkruns after each other without repeating or going back to a venue and a Bailey is for doing hundred in the same manner.
One of the participants Saturday, Sunil Soman Beni from Johannesburg, will achieve a double Bailey in two weeks’ time. He completed his 198th parkrun without any repeat at a venue here in Bwetty’s Bay.
Betty’s Bay event director, Wendy Lucas, was chuffed about the “fantastic” turnout. A special touch was given to the event by Cas who brought branded cupcakes along and there were also Australian chocolates for those who performed volunteer duties.
In total there were 411 finishers. The first male was Bradley Charles Taylor in a personal best time of 21:12. The first female was Enya Zipfel, also in a personal best time of 23:33. The best age graded score was delivered by Kerstin Jeschke (VW60-64), with 82,32 per cent, also thanks to a new personal best time of 23:34.
Two participants scored more than seventy per cent on the AGS table: James Irlam (VM55-59) and Lauren Rees (VW55-59). Seventeen others got more than 60 percent.
The first parkrun milestone of 25 finishes were achieved by Stephan Marais, Fiona Loubser and Kaisa du Plooy.
The 29 volunteers included members of the World Tourist group.