parkrun, lap two

It will be because there are a couple of event which have previously had over 500 participants so they want to at least give the impression of aiming to follow the rules, even though they won't turn person 501 away.

Based on the other restarts though people don't travel en-mass, even to nearby events that are open. The numbers were still significantly down on the event I did last week despite good weather and schools being back so people were no travelling. People have just found other things to do on a Saturday morning and will take a while for numbers to ramp up again.

I would have been mildly concerned about numbers in some specific locations before the stages of the UK restart, but now seeing the numbers have no concern about similar in Ireland.

I belive not opening Dublin comes from HQ. I doubt they think it would reach those numbers, but just in order to not annoy local governments... Then they go along to them in a couple of weeks and say that numbers are down, but very slight risk of 501 turning up at parkrun X, we're a great public health organisation, what will you do to us if 501 turn up?

Much like DCM having to cancel this year because they had no guarantees regarding restrictions and covering costs in the absence of being able to get insurance for such things, parkrun needs assurance from government that they won't get shutdown if 501 parkrunners turn up.

There could be any number of reasons for an individual juniors event to have not restarted, but all juniors across Ireland have permission to restart from parkrun HQ now.

Local landowners permission and volunteer numbers are different things which might be why they haven't restarted. Have a look on the Facebook pages for your local event to see if you can pick up a hint of why they might not have started yet, or email them nicely and ask what the story is and offer to volunteer if you can.

No Dublin events because there is still a limit of 500 people, and although 500 are unlikely to turn up they could get close to that at some Dublin events...so just a case of not pushing that limit or drawing attention to themselves in a bad way. the last thing they want is scare headlines about parkrun knowingly setting out to break any government rules anywhere globally.

Headlines about hundreds of people out getting active in the open air is what they want, not anything about breaching any arbitrary limits even if those limits do get removed a couple of weeks later and nobody else is abiding by them anyway.

parkrun tourists are an odd bunch. They make out there is loads of themselves, and let you know on Facebook whenever they are going anywhere to parkrun... but in reality they are but a tiny percentage of parkrunners at any particular event unless something very unusual is happening. Those unusual thing previously might have been Paul Sinton-Hewitt turning up to an inaugural event, but he's now self banned from doing that any more, or an unrelated massive running event happening nearby which draws big crowds in.

The vast majority of parkrunners only ever attend their local one or two nearest events.

I belive in the absence of a government statement saying that it doesn't apply to parkrun, which England had although it made no difference in the end, they are just going for the extreme caution route so that no one can claim they read it wrong if they did open up.

Because they are no longer concerned about having the majority of events in a country open at once means that Ireland does get a sooner restart though, otherwise they would wait until that ambiguous line was removed from the rules.

That's not normal parkrun policy, they want the numbers of parkrunners recorded even if they don't have barcodes.