Paul Sinton-Hewitt, the founder of parkrun, was born in Zimbabwe and moved to South Africa at the age of five, where he was brought up in care with his two siblings. Always a keen middle distance runner, he was a second for a friend in one of South Africa's most gruelling road races. Eventually he moved to the UK to work in IT and raise a family.

After a perfect storm of redundancy, marriage breakdown and an injury which prevented him from running with his own club, he decided he'd start a time trial in a local park, for his running club pals. The only proviso that they had to have coffee and cake with him afterwards.

Twenty years later, that timed run that he started has outpaced anything he could have envisaged and turned into parkrun. The 5k run around local parks on a Saturday morning, has gone global and the parkrun community has hundreds of thousands of people running or volunteering as stewards every week. Stephen Smith finds out what makes Paul Sinton-Hewitt run.

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