Parkun 242 - Letter from the year 2038

Good morning and welcome to parkrun #242.

We don’t have any parkrun milestones to celebrate today, so let’s give ourselves a big cheer for just turning up.

An interesting thing happened to me yesterday: I received an email from the future. I got sent the Mount Barker parkrun speech for parkrun number 1282 in the year 2038. I thought that you might be interested to hear how things have or have not changed. So here it is the Mount Barker parkrun welcome speech for 25th of September 2038. Maybe go along with it and pretend we are in the future.

[Ahem]

Welcome to Mount Barker parkrun #1282 on a beautiful mild 45 degree day. Do we have any first timers? How about any visitors from other planets? And what about any virtual participants?

It’s an out and back course. You run to the Bald Hills highway (or droneway), turn around the flag hologram and come back here to finish on the grass.

Please stick to the left, share the path with a smile and keep your animal droids on a leash.

Kids under 10 have to be within an arm-reach of a parent or an authorised robot guardian. Oh, and no hoverboards are allowed.

If you cross your arms in front of you, our AI bot will automatically remove you from the live video feed.

We’ll take a scan of your bio-energetic field at the start and finish line and we will immediately email you, your finish time, a full health report and advertisements from our sponsors Medibank and Athlete’s Foot.

[None of that old fashioned “no barcode, no result”. I like that!]

Let’s have a clap for our volunteer robots who set up the course and run the oxygen generators.

It’s time now to line up: robots and androids at the front (please mind your step), humans go next and the oozy Martians can go at the back, thanks. Enjoy your run!

So this was the parkrun speech from 20 years in the future. We are not there yet, so for you it’s “no barcode, no result, no health report”. And we do have some real volunteers to thank: Rosie who set up the halfway flag, Paul who’ll be immortalising us in photographs, Tania for timing, Harry and Matthew for chasing us with finish tokens, Julie and Declan for scanning them, and Lesley and David for being our tail walkers.

BTW, if you even wonder why we take so long to start you at the start line, it’s because we check that there are no oncoming walkers or cyclists who’ll get a 200+ surprises behind the corner on an early Saturday morning.

Enjoy your run and over to you Tania!