The English Romantic poet John Keats called autumn the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”. It’s the time for conkers, the stubborn seeds that fall from horse-chestnut trees, are peeled by children, skewered and then hung on strings and used in conker fights.

In England, autumn comes in October, and on a Saturday morning in October 2004 South African émigré Paul Sinton-Hewitt gathered with 12 friends in Bushy Park on the edges of London. Sinton-Hewitt was in the midst of a personal crisis. He was a runner nostalgic for the camaraderie he recalled from his days of running short time-trials in South Africa. That day they ran 5km around the park before breakfast, then went their own ways.

Fast forward to March 2011. Instead of conkers falling from trees, crocuses are pushing their heads through frost-bitten soils. It’s spring.

Bruce Fordyce, a son of another soil, was in England to run the London Marathon. Aged 46, he was past the prime that in the 1980s had seen him set world records and win the Comrades Marathon nine times and the London to Brighton three times. A few days before, he had been in Reading to give a talk and bumped into Sinton-Hewitt who persuaded him, despite his reservations, to join the Bushy Parkrun the day before the marathon. He did.

By then it had grown to 600 people.

That day changed Fordyce’s life. Ironically, one of history’s greatest long- distance athletes was bitten by short-distance fun-run fever. It was the sense of camaraderie, the joie de vivre, says Fordyce. However, he told Sinton-Hewitt, he didn’t think the parkrun would work in South Africa:

“There’s no spirit of volunteering. Our favourite sport is complaining.”

Nonetheless, he agreed to give it a go.

Johannesburg is a pleasantly park-full city. Unlike our neighbour Soweto, where the apartheid government barracked the black population, white people liked space – for themselves. They carved out little green lungs in many parts of the city. Today, these quirky little parks, each with a different character, are found in neighbourhoods all over the city.

One of them is Delta Park, where, six months later, Fordyce kept his word. He did slightly better than Sinton-Hewitt. South Africa’s first parkrun drew 26 people. But once again the bug bit. Within a few months, parkruns had started in Roodepoort, then Benoni and Nahoon Point in East London.

Fordyce compares the trajectory of the parkrun to the launch of Apollo 11, something he says he remembers watching on a grainy TV 50 years ago.

“It starts very slowly, struggling to get off the ground, to build momentum,” but then it moves into a period of exponential growth.

“That’s what happened with Parkrun South Africa which, for a while, was the fastest-growing parkrun in the world.”

Today Parkrun South Africa has 1.1-million registered runners. They have run more than 40-million kilometres since its inception. It takes place from 224 parks (or make-do stadiums in poorer communities) and is growing at a rate of 3,000 per week. The latest parkruns are in Sutherland, De Aar and Prieska. It has spread to Namibia and Eswatini and will in time climb up the continent to east and west Africa.

So, it’s not surprising that Fordyce gets very animated when he talks about this new baby of his, or rather 225-plus babies. He has run 219 different parkruns in South Africa and 27 in other countries including, recently, Russia (the Moscow parkrun). He can tell you the names of many of its regular runners.

But he’s most passionate about the thousands of volunteers, whose dedication keeps the parkrun wheels turning. Week after week, they pitch up as marshals, timers and race directors, their only reward being the fulfilment they feel in others’ pleasure. Fordyce thinks this is almost more exciting than the running and he can tell you the exact number of times he himself has been a volunteer: 82!

Strangely enough, he says, the last thing the parkrun is about is health:

“It’s about community, it’s about dignity, it’s about purpose. For example, it draws in people from frail-care homes who act as volunteers

Nobody really knows where to slot us in.”

In the era of climate crisis it’s also eco-friendly:

“Each week, once it’s over it disappears, leaving no footprint, no litter, no traces.”

In 1997, Fordyce, Basil D’Oliveira and several other sportspeople whose achievements had been overlooked by the apartheid government, received a special President’s Sporting Award from Nelson Mandela.

Mandela introduced Fordyce as “Bruce, the man with more Comrades than my ANC.” He advised him:

“not to just fade away, but to take what you have learnt about sport and teach our youngsters. Impart some of your knowledge about health and sport and exercise to our people. Leave something of yourself with them. Give them an activity that they can enjoy that is fun and good and free.”

Once senses that with the parkrun, he has done just that.

So, as we wrapped up our interview, I commented to Fordyce that his life and achievements strike me as living proof that it is possible for individuals to scale the heights of personal achievement and at the same time give back to the community.

There are other maverick South Africans who have established global brands, but they have become obscenely rich and forgotten the communities they came from. Then there are people like himself and Johnny Clegg who reach the summit of personal achievement but are prepared to take risks and stick to their principles along the way.

Fordyce laughs at the reference to Johnny Clegg. They were contemporaries as students and their paths crossed throughout life: “We both received honorary doctorates from Wits the same week in 2007,” he says, “except that Johnny sang his acceptance speech.”

Then he pondered for a moment, before his response came quickly: “Comrades is for myself. The parkrun is a legacy I will leave behind for humanity.”

Human(e) social networks develop in wondrous ways and they don’t all depend on digital media.

Sinton-Hewitt and Fordyce didn’t know it and didn’t plan it — but under the most inauspicious circumstances, they launched a global social movement in a city park. Almost 15 years later the parkrun has more than six million members. It takes place every Saturday morning at 8am from 2,000 accredited sites in cities, towns and villages spread across 23 countries (Japan and Russia are the latest to join) and rising. It’s staffed entirely by volunteers and is free-to-run.

Parkrunners have become one of the largest and fastest-growing secular social movements in the world.

On August 15, 2019 I signed up to become number 6,088,096.

In the era of I, they offer the possibility of We.

In coming months Maverick Citizen will look at a number of neighbourhoods through the eyes of parkrunners and the communities they come from. Let us know if your parkrun has a special story to tell. MC