For most of his life Emon Choudhury has not thought of himself as a runner – or even as someone interested in fitness. But a chance encounter with parkrun has transformed this. Because once Emon and his daughter had completed their first 5km event, they were hooked. Emon walked, pushing his daughter in the buggy. Before long he was raising vital funds for parkrun.
One Saturday morning, Emon Choudhury set out for a walk in the park with his baby daughter, Lilly. He was not expecting an encounter that would change his life. Lilly was just a few months old and was waking up early. To give his wife some much needed rest, Emon put his little girl in her buggy and headed for nearby Roberts Park, in Saltaire, West Yorkshire – just a few miles north of Bradford.
“I went to the park with my normal pram,” says Emon, “and I saw some people walking at the back of the parkrun. They invited me to walk with them and have a little chitchat. So that’s what I did.” Emon talked to the tail walkers and they told him all about parkrun. Emon decided to join in regularly. Initially walking and then after a while running, always pushing his daughter in the pram.
“I got more and more into parkrun,” says Emon, “and I started posting about it on my social media. I was saying: ‘I’ve discovered this amazing thing, parkrun.’ And everyone who responded was saying ‘Oh, where’ve you been for the last 15 years?’”
Emon says he was not fit when he started parkrun, but had been very adventurous as a youngster. And in 2020 he was one half of the team that won the second series of BBC show Race Across The World. In the show, Emon and his nephew Jamiul Choudhury (who he hadn’t seen in a decade) travelled from Mexico to Argentina to secure a £20,000 prize. They donated half of the prize money to children’s charities in South America. The contestants had almost no resources to help them make the journey. It was gruelling in parts, and so Emon is no stranger to pushing himself.
By the time Emon walked his first parkrun, he had started running occasionally during the Covid-19 pandemic. But parkrun unlocked more than he could have imagined. “Really, the best thing that I enjoy is the camaraderie of parkrun,” he explains. “When I first joined there were 200 or 300 people at the Roberts Park parkrun. And they’re all my neighbours. In the 15 years that I’ve lived on my street, I’d never spoken to any of them. I’d say ‘hi’ and ‘bye’, but that’s about it.
When I went to parkrun, I’d think, ‘oh, you live at number 56’ or ‘you live at number 64’ and I’d get chatting to them. Now – fortunately – I know all my neighbours on first name terms. And that’s what parkrun has enabled me to do: to engage with my immediate community.”
Emon has also become involved in the junior parkrun that takes place on Sunday mornings at Roberts Park. He says that he really enjoys going along to volunteer – always taking Lilly. He hopes that one day his daughter will want to take part in parkrun herself. But for now, Lilly is happy to be pushed around the course, giving her dad encouragement and instructions. In fact, Emon and his daughter recently completed their 100th parkrun together.
One aspect of parkrun that Emon has become very excited about is raising money for the charity. “I get places for a lot of marathons and half marathons,” says Emon, “and that gives me the option to raise money for a charity. And I didn’t know that parkrun is a charity – up until literally four or five weeks before the London Marathon.”
Emon saw a post from parkrun explaining that the organisation was looking for people to raise money to support its work. “I said, ‘I’ll happily raise money for parkrun, because it has given me so much.’ So fundraising in the London Marathon was my first time. And since then I’ve done other events, like the Manchester 10k, the Comrades Ultra Marathon in South Africa and the Great North Run.”
Being really passionate about spreading the word that parkrun is a charity keeps Emon motivated. “If I never realised it was a charity, how many other people don’t know?”
Emon says that on the year he ran the London Marathon for parkrun, he was wearing a parkrun vest. “And people started asking why I was in a parkrun top,” he says. “So I told them: ‘It is a charity. How else do you think these events are put on? Each event costs money. And there are 1,250-odd events in the UK.’ I was raising money to keep it free, for everyone, forever. That was my aim, just to get the message out.”
Emon is passionate about parkrun. And he has a message for anyone who might be interested in going to their local event, but isn’t sure if it’s right for them. “I’d say you’ve got nothing to lose. It’s not going to cost you anything. You just have to take the leap. If I didn’t go to parkrun on a Saturday, I would probably be lying in bed. But with parkrun, it gets me out of bed. And afterwards you feel like you’ve accomplished so much and it’s only 11 o’clock. It’s revolutionised my weekends. And I feel that I’ve bonded with my daughter, because we’ve got parkrun. She knows that every Saturday morning she’s going to parkrun with me. She’ll meet all her friends and I’ll meet all my friends and we have a little jog around the park.”
