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Giants, chocolate bars and mass running events

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It’s blowing a hooley out there again, pun intended. Unfortunately, it also did the same on my return to running club this week; sunny before, sunny after, but during a torrential thunderstorm. Two days later and I might be dry but my trainers are still sopping. It’s also the day parkrun, a worldwide organisation that helps volunteers run free, weekly, timed 5k events, of which there are hundreds in the UK have confirmed their events won’t be back in England on June 5th; but more on that later.

That’s because first, I want to talk about extrapolation. Ok maybe that sounds a bit dull, but it’s an important point. Bear with me. Especially as this is where the giants and chocolate bars come in. Extrapolation is the process by which you take data from results you are seeing as a current trend and use it to predict what might be the case for data outside of that range, or, more simply, when you use stuff you know to predict stuff you don’t. But it can easily go wrong - imagine if we were to take data on everybody’s height from birth to age 16 and extrapolate to age 40, well I’d be very tall, indeed a veritable giant.

And chocolate bars? This is even worse. They could go extinct! Ok, I’m being dramatic – that’s not likely. You only come to that conclusion if you do an extrapolation. It was back in 1983 that Stephen J. Gould, a popular science author, published an essay in his book Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toe on how the Hershey bar would be so small by December 1998 that it would cease to exist. This is because he had data that showed how every time the chocolate bar was reintroduced at a new larger size, it was actually smaller than the last time such a new larger size was introduced after years of what is now termed shrinkflation. The essay is actually more on economics than anything else, but I’m somewhat sorry that the Hershey bar does still exist. I don’t like Hershey chocolate at all, yet somehow, if I find it offered, I still get tempted to check this again by actually having some.

A Hershey bar

So back to running and parkrun. It has always been the case that I was supportive of parkrun as a positive thing in my life; no doubt, I’ll do a blog post on my running journey at some point to explain more.

But over the past few weeks, parkrun HQ are falling into the trap of extrapolating and ignoring caveats. In order to support the planned return of their events in England in early June 2021, parkrun commissioned an expert to assess whether their events would be safe, something to be commended. The report can be found here. But then came the press releases: ‘Independent studies show exceptionally low risk of infection and transmission’, ‘which [would result] in only 0.015% of runners potentially acquiring a COVID-19 infection’ and, most strangely of all, ‘Despite overwhelming evidence that parkrun events are amongst the safest activities people can participate in…’.

The problem is all these statements are extrapolated based on the original study. Dig down into the details and you’ll find the study is for an average parkrun size, 286 people, performed on a wide singular lap and where people rigorously follow protocols. Everyone knows parkruns aren’t mostly like that. You can’t extrapolate from such a study to justify the statements in press releases.

So if you can’t easily extrapolate from this type of study, how do you judge if it might be sensible to allow mass start running races without social distancing in the current times. And here’s where it gets positive, you can do real-world trials to test it. And even more positively, these are actually ongoing.

It really looks like all that we need is a little more patience, and we can have our favourite race events back up and running. Meanwhile, 30 of us can get together and go for a park run, aka a run in the park. But maybe not in a thunderstorm.

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