The Parkrun world record has been broken by Northern Irish teenager Nick Griggs, who knocked a second off the previous best time in Belfast.
Griggs, from Newmills in Tyrone, clocked 13 minutes and 44 seconds at the Victoria Park edition of the weekly 5km event, bettering the 13:45 clocked by Olympian Andrew Butchart – who represented Team GB at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 – in Edinburgh in June 2023.
The Belfast venue was also the place where the best women’s Parkrun time of 15:13 was set by Ciara Mageean last December.
The 19-year-old Griggs has been making waves in the world of athletics, winning the European Under-20 3,000m title as a 16-year-old in 2021 and, after further European medals at age group level, qualifying for the senior European Championships in Rome earlier this year.
He narrowly missed out on selection for the Paris 2024 Olympics for Team Ireland, as Andrew Coscoran, Luke McCann and Cathal Doyle pipped him to the available 1500m places.
And Griggs admitted he was shocked to set the fastest Parkrun time in history, having not even set out to do so.
“I wasn’t going into it trying to break the record,” Griggs said on BBC Radio Ulster. “Before the race, I knew I was in good shape and knew I should be within a chance of breaking the record. It was a bit of a sprint finish to get it but it was a good feeling.
“I don’t think anyone really knew until we finished. I looked at my watch and saw I had taken a second off the world record. It was pretty shocking. I wasn’t really thinking about it, to be honest. We all realised after and there was a bit of a buzz around it.”
Since missing out on Olympic selection, Griggs has produced personal bests over 1500m, 3,000m and 5,000m.
He clocked 3:35.04 over 1500m at the British Milers Club meeting in Tooting a few days before the start of the Olympics, a Northern Irish record 3,000m time of 7:36.59 at the London Diamond League meeting in July and another Northern Irish record of 13:13.07 over 5,000m at the Morton Games
Parkrun technically does not classify times as world records, with the organisation describing its events as a “run and not a race”.
