Famous Fitness Coach Joe Wicks Doubled a parkrun Field in Peterborough

Joe Wicks drew a record field of 1,205 runners and walkers to Ferry Meadows parkrun in Peterborough on Saturday, the first four-figure turnout in the event’s history and almost exactly double its average for 2026, as per the BBC. Whether any of those people are still there in September is a question parkrun’s own results archive can already answer, because Ferry Meadows was the third stop on a summer tour and the first two are far enough in the past to measure.

Ferry Meadows had never passed 1,000 finishers. Its previous best was 949, on Christmas Day 2025, a date that reliably inflates parkrun fields, and across the other 26 events it has held this year the average was 600. Saturday took 68 volunteers to staff, against a 2026 norm in the low 40s. Henry Jarvis finished first in 16:45 and Abigail Branston was the first woman home in 20:51. The event began on Aug. 3, 2013, when 210 people ran and 14 volunteered.

Wicks opened the tour at Philips Park parkrun in east Manchester on June 20. That morning 565 people finished, comfortably an event record; the previous best was 394, set in March 2023. Over the four Saturdays before his visit, Philips Park averaged 142 finishers. Over the four Saturdays since, it has averaged 119. The most recent event, held on Saturday while Wicks was in Peterborough, drew 115.

Maidenhead parkrun, the second stop, tells the same story on a larger baseline. 900 people finished at Braywick Park on July 4, against an average of 439 over the previous four weeks. The three Saturdays since have produced 378, 409 and 401, an average of 396. Local coverage described the July 4 field as a record. parkrun’s event history does not: 965 people finished at Maidenhead on Nov. 5, 2022, which leaves Wicks’ morning as the second-largest field the event has held.

What the Tour Is Measuring

The tour is a Brooks Running activation built on the company’s existing partnership with parkrun, and Brooks has been specific about the numbers it likes. Announcing this year’s dates, it said last summer’s smaller version produced an average 188 percent rise in first-time participants at the events Wicks attended, along with more women taking part and record attendance at every stop. Carl Newman, Brooks’ territory director for Northern Europe, called the response “amazing.” Kenneth Foreman, parkrun UK’s head of commercial and fundraising, said the point was that “there’s no single way to take part.” Every one of those figures describes a single morning. None of them describes whether anyone came back.

The limits of the counter-evidence are worth stating. parkrun publishes finisher totals by event, not by person, so someone who tried Philips Park in June and now runs a different 5K on Saturdays would not show up in these numbers at all. Weather, school holidays and course closures move weekly attendance around. Three Saturdays is a short window at Maidenhead, and Ferry Meadows has not held an event since. What the data does show is that at both stops where enough time has passed to look, the host event is no bigger than it was before Wicks came, and Philips Park is slightly smaller.

Co-event director Gary Parr told the Peterborough Telegraph that Saturday’s field included 130 first-timers. Ferry Meadows publishes its own run reports, and one from a busy Saturday in April recorded 102 people visiting the course for the first time, of whom 32 had never done a parkrun anywhere. Which of those two measures Parr meant matters, because the first is tourism and the second is recruitment. Wicks, speaking to the BBC before the start, said he liked knowing “that there’s a family that might never come to parkrun who are here today,” and added: “That, for me, is a win.”

He arrives with more running behind him than the average celebrity booking. Wicks, 40, finished the London Marathon in 5:51:54 in April, walking and running it in intervals, and in February his Body Coach Foundation became official charity partner of the Mini London Marathon, with a stated goal of getting one million children active by 2030. parkrun itself began in 2004 with 13 runners and five volunteers in Bushy Park, and now counts more than ten million registered participants worldwide, a scale built entirely on people returning.

Two dated stops remain. Wicks is due at Coventry parkrun on Aug. 8 and at Lochore Meadows in Fife on Sept. 5, with a final event listed on his own site for Sept. 19 or 20 and no venue attached to it yet. Both remaining hosts publish their finisher counts every week, which means the test runs twice more before the tour ends.