How walking is helping more people benefit from parkrun

Ewa Monteith-Hodge, Monitoring Evaluation Accountability and Learning (MEAL) Officer at Walking Scotland

Walking and wheeling require little or no specialist equipment and are a fantastic way to increase physical activity. They can have huge benefits for our physical, social and mental health.

We want to see more people incorporate walking into their everyday lives, and are excited to see research that demonstrates that recent changes to parkrun are helping people to do just this.

parkrun is a free, weekly community event that runs every Saturday across local parks in Scotland. While it has traditionally been associated with jogging or running 5km, a “parkwalker” volunteer role was introduced in 2022 to better support people who choose to walk. Parkwalkers help make it clear that there is no pressure to run, encouraging participants to take part at a pace that works for them. 

New research from the University of Stirling, published in the Journal of Public Health Research, has shown that encouraging more people to take part at a walking pace has meant an overall slowing of completion times. This shows that more people are in fact walking alongside those running.

The promotion of a slower pace was linked with an increase in the proportion of women and older people taking part for the first time.

The study compared venues across Scotland that fully adopted, partially adopted, and did not adopt the new role into their events. Events that fully introduced the parkwalker role have seen an increase of over 55% (55.3%) in the number of walkers taking part, and events that partially adopted the role saw a similar increase (54.6%). Those that did not only saw an increase of 22%.

Read the full study in the Journal of Public Health Research.

Published: 20 January 2026