(by John Pratt)
In the late 1990s, Mornington Chasers had only about 30 members (not all of whom were active) and was anxiously trying to find ways to recruit more. One though was to leaflet at events in which the club participated (it regularly ran in the Metropolitan League cross country and other events, notably the Highgate Harriers Regents Park 10km series) but this was unlikely to attract new members except by poaching them from other clubs. Someone had the idea that we needed a kind of ‘shop window’ event of our own, but with such a modest membership we were uncertain of our ability to launch one. It occurred to me, the Chairman at the time, that the Regents Park 10kms were seriously short of participants (I think I ran in one that had fewer than 10 runners), and that we might be able to persuade Highgate to let us share the event, which would have the advantage to them of bringing additional runners from the Chasers as well as spreading the workload over two clubs. I made an approach to Highgate and they said that they would be happy for us to take it over entirely. And so we did, and it proved for us an enormously generous gesture.
Because I was Chairman, and it was my idea in the first place, I ended up responsible for organising the series. My first decision (cashing in on power while I had it) was to reverse the course route. It always seemed to me that the long straight from the obelisk at the top of the Broadwalk to the footbridge, even though slightly downhill, was always run into the teeth of a gale (because it faced southwest), so it now became a modest uphill (you had to climb to the obelisk one way or the other) but with a generally following wind.
I also had the modestly bright idea of getting the series listed in Runners World, as a way of gaining more participants, and before we knew it (assisted by the fact that Time Out somehow picked it up and it went whatever ‘viral’ was called in those days), we had numbers running into several hundred, and the Chasers membership increased substantially. And even though we had been keen to maintain the relatively informal, no-frills, low cost aspect of the race, the high take-out produced a considerable revenue for the Chasers. In the event, we had to get a bit more organised to cope with the higher numbers, and Gary Meekins (and his wife Theresa) took over the entries and arcane calculations of the Grand Prix placings. Later, too, Maurice Raynor took over the organisation of the races. For similar reasons, we decided to eliminate the road crossings and shifted the start and finish to the Charlbert street entrance (in the north west corner of the Park) and later still when the new changing facilities at the Hub were built we moved again to the present start to take advantage of them.
This was my first experience of organising a running event, though I had been responsible for planning and organising several orienteering competitions, including a regional championship, and underwent were several ‘interesting’ experiences. First we had to register it with the SE Athletics Association, not least for indemnity insurance purposes, who made the bureaucracy of orienteering look astonishingly benign. Amongst the requirements was a 34 item ‘risk assessment’, apparently designed for the London marathon or similar but which was, to put it mildly (which I rarely did), inappropriate for an informal small scale event. It appeared to require the presence of a fleet of ambulances, road closures and heaven knows what else. I assured SEAA that we had done everything that we needed, and we got the permit, which rather raises questions about the value of the process.
We had also to approach the powers-that-be in Regents Park, to establish that we were permitted to run the event. Somewhat to my surprise, they were happy for us to take over, and even more surprising, enthusiastic to have a 10km series, as it offered (politically convenient) evidence that they were making a Royal Park available to a range of users. I was anxious that the increased numbers would not be a problem to other park users, but the feedback from the officials was that the runners were no problem at all; the only complaints they had received about the races were from runners who had been deliberately impeded by members of the public or out of control dogs.
Chasers had assiduously followed Highgate’s practice of not taking money inside the park, but dealing with entry on the day at the roadside, and I assured the officials that we were continuing doing this, so as not to break the rule about trading within the Royal Park, only to learn that this rule covered the roads within the Park too. Fortunately, they did not seem inclined to prosecute the innocents of Highgate for their years of criminal activity.