Bothamley Park, 77 Champion St, Cannons Creek, Porirua 5024
Type of Course – Out and back
Shoes Required – Road
Things to know
Permanently marked. Ample free parking with parking suitable for motorhomes.
Nearest showers at Terauparaha Arena
Forgot your barcode? Email the RD to print for you or print at the library.
Very low risk of cancellation
Cafe: Porirua McCafe, McDonalds on Lyttelton Ave.
Location of start:
The run starts at the corner of Windley and Champion Streets, Porirua.
Getting there by public transport
Bus route 226, stop number 2302. Please check timetable before leaving home.
Catch the train to Porirua railway station on the Waikanae line and walk 1.5km via Mepham Pl and Champion St to the start.
Getting there on foot
Bothamley Park has many entrances and is friendly for walkers. Just follow the stream to the parkrun start.
Getting there by road
From State Highway 1 turn off at the Mungavin Interchange and head to Porirua East on Mungavin Ave. At the Z Petrol Station turn left into Champion St. Follow Champion St until the Windley St intersection.
Park on Champion St inside the white line and walk the short distance from Champion St to Bothamley Park (signposted).
Stats
First run: July 6, 2013
Inaugural attendance: 71
Record attendance: 275 (01/01/2020)
Course records
Women: Hannah Oldroyd 18:09 (27/05/2017)
Men: Paul Martelletti 15:47 (09/05/2015)
The Story Behind Porirua parkrun…
Astrid Van Meeuwen-Dijkgraaf, original event director
My husband was over in the UK and discovered parkrun but he didn’t run one.
He came back and said he needed to get fit and wondered if we had one here. That’s how we discovered Lower Hutt parkrun. He went along and then I started to join him.
It was a bit silly driving half an hour to do a half hour parkrun. We thought we should set one up of our own.
We spent three months looking for somewhere in Porirua to have a parkrun. We tried out all kinds of routes but none worked for us.
I mentioned it to someone at council and they suggested Bothamley Park and that was how we got started.
We hadn’t run that many before we thought about it, it was maybe three or four months.
Thirty minutes isn’t that far but we thought if we could set up our own we could sleep in a bit, but that didn’t work out as we ended up getting up even earlier.
We ran it for almost six years and then I decided I needed a break.
We were really fortunate because we went to talk to the council about using the track in their park and they were at the point wanting to improve the park and had a five year budget.
It wasn’t somewhere you would go unless in a group. They cleared lots of vegetation. We came along and said Lower Hutt gets 60-80 and we could manage 60 most weeks.
They were very supportive and advertised on the council website. They had a fortnightly council newspaper and advertised it there a couple of times.
Word got around fairly quickly.
There were a number of people who were living in or close by going to Porirua parkrun who had been going to Lower Hutt.
It’s always been enthusiastically received and grew gradually.
We’ve put up a humongous billboard on State Highway 1. Council asked us what we wanted and they delivered. We’ve had huge support from them. They’ve been really awesome.
Some of the council staff have even become RDs. We’ve been very lucky.
It’s a lovely walk or run through the forest beside a stream. We’re really friendly. Most people who have been say it’s the nicest parkrun they’ve been to.
It’s in a gully so even if it’s howling it’s not that windy. On windy days we get quite a lot of Lower Hutt people turning up.
Our sign has been photographed a lot.
Because the start line is away form the road it’s reassuring to new people that they’re in the right spot.
One person came along and was into bird photography, we’ve bird hides along the Pautahanui Inlet.
What I really enjoy about parkrun is the community it’s built. We really noticed it during the lockdown, People you never would have met previously running virtually together still.
For us, one of the reasons we set up parkrun was we had already lived here five years. It’s a small street but we didn’t feel like there was much of a community.
So for us parkrun has allowed us to connect to our community and that’s really important.
That’s also why we stepped back. We didn’t want it to be ours, we wanted it to be our community’s.
While in Porirua…
Titahi Bay beach
Mana Island
Zealandia
Plimmerton Beach
Camborne Walkway