In reply to Rampikino:
You are imagining a slight against yourself which isn't there.
My points are
1) The events are insured by UKA. This costs money. If there is no income per runner then this cost is either coming from sponsors paying for it, the initial 'franchise' fee being invested to pay for the insurance, or fees taken from affiliation fees from events or UKA members. I hoped it was not borne by the last of these. The reason for this hope is that a large number of club events are entirely volunteer led without any recourse to professional staff taking any salary from 'franchise fees'. This is from someone who is both a registered parkrun athlete and someone who has been a volunteer race director.
1a) supplimental: I also expressed the hope that the rate of claims was low and that parkrun insurance fees were 'paying their way' in terms of these claims. Given the large number of persons taking part I can foresee that claims will be made. However, I would not see it to be equitable if in the insurance pot all the money way being taken out by parkrun, but most of the fees were being paid by non-parkrun events.
2) I appreciate what parkrun has done for participation, but express a concern for the future about funding. The £3000 (iad in my mind £5000 when I was looking at it several years ago, but I probbaly forgot the correct fee) affiliation fee paid will not last forever. For that you get a rather good IT system and some initial basic support from parkrun. I do not know how much new development work is being done on the IT system, but there will be an ongoing cost for servers and connections to the Internet for the IT system. They pay several staff (presumably at acceptable pay rates). You do all the rest of the work. There are (currently) no ongoing affiliation fees. There is also income from sponsorship. parkrun have committed to be free at the point of delivery to the athlete, and they will not pay for use of the facility. My worry is that when there is a drop off in the number of new parkrun events (Are we reaching this point?) , that the affiliation fees will drop, what happens then? Will they employ fewer staff, will they be more successful at raising sponsorship and if so what will those sponsors want for their cash. There is a basic rule of things like this - if it looks like its free to you, then you are the product being sold. Or 'there's no such thing as a free lunch'. I know what Paul says about this, but am unsure how true it can be. What I do like very much is the value that health authorities and councils put on it as an event that encourages participation in an active lifestyle. Thumbs up to both parkrun and public sector for this.
3) I like what parkrun does in terms of being free and getting people active, but there is a certain amount of playing with words to make it free at the point of entry in terms of the word 'race' vs 'park run'. It has it's own section in the UKA rules to make this clear. This alongside the rules for fun runs means that it would be very difficult for a competing organisation (e.g. a local club) to set up a similar system and also derive value from it . And yes, I know that Paul put money into it early on, but that wouldn't be easy today. parkrun pretty much has a monopoly in the UK on free to enter events with results listed in finisher time order with times listed under UKA rules. Fun runs cannot publish results. Otherwise to publish results it has to be race and this requires affiliation fees.
parkrun could publish results in alphabetical order by surname and not publish the first finishers if it wanted to clearly disambiguate itself from the idea of a race.
4) You said that parkrun wasn't a race as otherwise you'd have more club runners. The number and type of runners does not affect what its classification is. At a local race the number of athletes coming in under 40 minutes for 10K was under (9/600+) 3% - similar to your parkrun. This would indicate that parkrun is no less competitive than some local races. The number of registered athletes was 30% rather than your 15%, but at our local parkrun its pretty close to 20%. The claim that people are running for position (in a road race) not time is generally equally irrelevant - unless you are winning prizes at a race most people are running for a time. For most people it doesn't matter if its 201st or 202nd, but under MM minutes in a race is worth running hard for. Position is relevant for things like cross country etc as conditions are so variable. The terrain has been mentioned as has the measurement. Again this is only because of the way the rules are set up currently. There are road races that are only allowed to have very short distances of non-road, trial races which have to have at least x amount of trail, cross country races that have to be able to be run wholly in spikes, but parkrun is outwith all of these.
The reason parkrun is not a race is that it is constituted that way and is given special recognition by UKA not afforded other organisations. This is fine, but in many essence other than its consitution it mimics a race. Again this is not to 'put parkrun down', but to recognise that parkrun has a privileged position in the running community.