lsquo;How I overcame paralysis and ran a half marathon&rsquo parkrun funeral. It was a surprisingly uplifting farewell. I arrived at the church on Kew Green in south west London on a beautifully crisp and sunny autumnal day. The hearse was just drawing up, alongside a queue of people filing in. In front of me was a man wearing trainers and a ‘parkrun 100’ jacket. I knew I was in the right place. Inside it was packed. A huge photograph of a beaming Serge Lourie smiling at us all as we went in. Serge was 78 when he set off on his usual 5km run from Kew to Chiswick Bridge and back along the River Thames. His run that day was followed as ever by coffee and croissants in a local cafe with his running friends. Then he went home, lay down and died. It was a poetic way to go for a man who was passionate about running. And a huge shock for his family and friends. We just thought he would go on and on and on.
Serge first pulled on his trainers in the 1970s when he was coaxed out of the door by one of his neighbours in Kew. His maiden run was the exact same 5km stretch of the Thames that he ran on his very last day. Serge became hooked. He ran his first marathon in his 30s and then decided to do one for every decade of his life. He had been planning the next one for his 80s. As I sat in the pews at his funeral, I thought how deeply annoyed Serge would have been to know that he’d never get to do it.
Serge was a parkrun fanatic. He was almost 60 when he ran his first one in a decent 29 minutes and 37 seconds. That was 2007. Richmond parkrun was only 2 months old. For the next 17 years Serge was an almost guaranteed fixture at the Richmond park start line. If he wasn’t running, he was volunteering. His parkrun stats say it all. By the time he died in the autumn of last year, he had run 473 parkruns and volunteered 207 times. He would have been furious not to have got his parkrun 500 T-shirt.
Serge loved to talk to people, which is how I first met him when I turned up alone in 2011 for my very first parkrun. He bounded up towards me, a great welcoming smile. “You’re that newsreader”, he boomed. “Meet my friend Sally Woodward Gentle. She works in TV too!” And that is how many years of Sunday morning runs with Serge, Sally and the Kew runners began. We would meet in the road where Serge lived at 8am. Half the street would turn out to run. A gaggle of all ages, paces, shapes and sizes, we’d head up to Richmond Park for at least 10km before running back to Kew again for coffee and croissants at Sally’s. Serge, Sally and co were the first to teach me that running is not lonely. Far from it in fact. When I set out with them, I had no idea of the deep running friendships ahead. I quickly learnt about their marathon times, race goals, training regimes, niggles, aches and pains. No one asked me about my job on TV or treated me any differently. Running is such a levelling sport. That’s what they quickly taught me.
And so it took me ages to discover what they actually did when they weren’t dressed in lycra. Serge was a prominent local politician, a Liberal Democrat, the leader of Richmond council. It was the absence of lycra that confused me on the day of his funeral. It took me a while to recognise my running friends in their sombre attire. But when I glanced down, I smiled because so many were in trainers. A final running farewell to our friend.
