I spend all week working on economics, then kick off the weekend by volunteering/running at the local parkrun. You might not think this sounds hugely exciting, but it means I really enjoyed reading some new research that imaginatively brings the two together.
Parkrun involves a 5km run taking place each Saturday at more than 700 locations across the UK. The purpose is to get us exercising, but the bonus (because each runner’s speed is recorded) is a great dataset. The researchers’ cunning idea is to extract insights about how our health changes in response to shifts in the economic climate by examining how fast thousands of people ran each week between 2004 and 2020.
