Today I went to "the Fyre Festival of 5Ks"
The inaugural Swiftie Run was a disaster — and unfortunately so is the organisers' response to the dozens of complaints
Buckle up, I’ve entered my Watchdog era.
Sometimes I think “Hey! Wouldn’t it be fun to organise a running event! How hard can it be!” but after attending the first ever Swiftie Run, this morning in a rainy Battersea Park, I think I’ll just stick to volunteering at parkrun.
Back in September, I got an ad for the event — the first by a mysterious new outlet called Run Fanatics (their website doesn’t contain any info about who’s behind it) — and booked my place with a 10% early bird discount. It wasn’t cheap: £25 for a spot and £20 for a sight-unseen finishers’ t-shirt.
But I was excited! Like the rest of the world, I’m a Taylor Swift fan who couldn’t get tickets for the Eras tour, plus I, y’know, like running. My best friend booked places for her and her 11 year old daughter, and some local running friends also eagerly signed up with their kids. I toyed with booking for mine, but decided they were a bit young, plus it was expensive. I am REALLY glad about this now, as I can only imagine the moaning and regret.
Fast-forward to this morning and, like a loon, I did Battersea parkrun first which, despite huge numbers (I came 959th!), went very smoothly. When I finished parkrun, I grabbed a quick coffee with my official chauffeur/running pal Tim (hi Tim!) and then went over to find my friends in the Swiftie “event village”, which was more of an event hamlet with a couple of Taylor Swift cardboard cutouts soggily presiding over it (the ones you can get from Tesco for £38).
We were “lucky”: we’d got there pretty early (just after 10am, when it opened) so we only had to queue for a few minutes to get our race bibs, plus the merch we had pre-ordered (more on this later). We ruled out getting anything from the lone coffee stand, because the queue was enormous. Then, we handed our stuff over to the bag drop — again, not too much bother, and they’d given us numbered tags to attach to our bags — and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
(It was freezing cold and wanking it down, by the way, but obviously that’s not the organisers’ fault. But it’s unfortunate when people had been encouraged to wear Taylor-inspired outfits: there were sequins and hot pants galore. It might’ve been better to plan that first event for a more reliable time of year, weather-wise — or at least let people know at the bag drop that they might want to hang onto their coats for, say, another 90 minutes)
Here’s what happened next:
At around 11.15am, there was supposed to be a warm-up performance from a Taylor Swift tribute, but around this time people started vaguely drifting to what appeared to be the start line. However, there were still dozens of people queuing for their race bibs and nobody had any clue what was going on.
We stood around, and at various points we and others asked the very unenthusiastic marshals what was happening. None of them had a clue and they all looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. I dunno, maybe they were Kanye West fans.
While standing around I heard someone remark that this felt like the running equivalent of the infamous viral Glasgow Wonka experience.
My friend’s brilliant but very cold and damp daughter (11) said “This is how I imagine it felt on the Titanic”.
I’m quoting other people’s witticisms because I was too cold and damp to make any myself.
At one point we were all moved forward again, and nobody was sure if this was the start of the race or if the tribute warm-up might be happening? It wasn’t the start of the race but I couldn’t see or hear anything resembling a tribute warm-up and I didn’t really give a shit because I just wanted to get on with the running, but a lot of kids were really looking forward to seeing the Taylor tribute (aka Fail-or Swift?). A drone went over at one point, causing a murmur of excitement.
THEN we were all moved back towards where it turned out the actual start line was, which was a complicated undertaking where all the people who wanted to start near the back had to squeeze along some muddy grass to get behind all the people who wanted to start nearer the front.
Finally, at midday, a middle-aged man (maybe he was THE Man) sounded a horn and we were off. This was half an hour after the race was supposed to start, and a whopping two hours after the “event village” opened. For a 5K fun run with seemingly less than 800 participants and an average finish time of around half an hour, this is madness. I genuinely stood around less before London Marathon.
There were supposed to be pacers on bikes playing Taylor Swift songs, but we didn’t encounter any. I think the only music I heard on the course during A RUN THAT WAS PAYING TRIBUTE TO A POP STAR was from other runners’ phones. I wish I’d worn earphones and just listened to Taylor Swift myself tbh.
As far as I’m aware, none of these things happened There were very few marshals and only one of them was in any way enthusiastic.
The run itself was fine, albeit wet. I even bumped into my old work pal Sarah, who I hadn’t seen for three years. I could easily do that for free at parkrun on any given Saturday though.
At the finish line, we were given our medals. They are really cool medals! Well done on getting the medals right!
We were also given a banana and a plastic bottle of water. I was really grateful for the banana because I hadn’t eaten since my 7am porridge and it was by now 12.40pm and I’d run two 5Ks (this is on me for not bringing snacks, but I would’ve grabbed something from the “event village” if the queues hadn’t been so enormous).
When we got to the bag drop — you know, the one that was fairly well organised at the start — it was a total free for all. They had taken down the barriers and anyone could just grab any bag without the tag numbers being checked. I just had a little rucksack with my water bottle and jacket in, but there were people who’d travelled quite a distance and had actual valuables who’d been told there would be secure storage for their stuff. Terrible.
It would be much safer to leave your scarf at his sister’s house My friend’s daughter really wanted one of the “In my running era” water bottles they were flogging, but we just didn’t want to give these jokers any more of our money.
As we left the park with the final runners finishing the race, we DID see one lone bike pacer playing music (not very audibly). They existed after all! Sort of.
That t-shirt I pre-ordered? It looks like this.
OK, so this is a poorly-executed reference to the You Belong With Me video but that doesn’t make it any less of an eyesore. Remember, you had to pay for these (at a lot of races, a t-shirt is included in the registration price — which wasn’t cheap). I think people might have liked the event date or something more like the design on the medals or just something — anything — a little less Clip Art. Also, to claim your merch, you had to dig out your booking email, as they had no record of what people had paid for and just blindly handed over the items once they’d glanced at the email. This also meant you could queue up more than once if you wanted and hope they didn’t recognise you again, or forward the email to a mate there to claim some tat for free. I guess they were just banking on nobody wanting more than one of those t-shirts.
After the event, I posted this to my Instagram stories:
And I quickly got a response from Run Fanatics taking full responsibility for the teething problems, saying they had learned a lot and offering me a full refund AND a free place at one of their future events. Great!
… except I’m pretty sure that by writing this post I’ll be kissing goodbye to all that but I feel it’s important to speak out somewhere other than Instagram because guess what’s happening now…
RunFanatics are sharing “positive” stories about the event (mostly just people showing off their outfits and medals) but some people say their negative comments have been deleted from previous posts. In case any more disappear, here are some quotes from the ones I took screenshots of.
"Absolute rip off. Missing times, no timers, dreadful organisation, hardly any music or marshals. Run pathetic, not fanatic. They should be frantic to fix this.”
“The worst organised event I’ve ever been to”
“Absolute turd of an event… Next time I want something around this level of fun I’ll go visit my local graveyard.”
“Thanks for deleting your runners comments, which were only the truth. Classy.”
And the one I’ve borrowed for this Substack title: “The Fyre Festival of 5Ks”
One of my local running pals who took part, with her 10 year old daughter and her 11 year old friend, also messaged Run Fanatics to complain and was offered a free place in a future event but no mention of a refund. When she said that a friend had been offered a refund they told her that that person was an “exceptional circumstance” which I assume is because they looked at my profile and saw that I’m a journalist. The friend in question had spent upwards of £100 on places and merch, plus she’s a really lovely person who, unlike me, does a very important and undervalued job so it makes me quite cross. I believe some running influencers and people from well-known running clubs have also been offered refunds, whereas everyone else has just been offered a place in a future event, which they don’t even want to attend.
I’ve also heard that some people’s results are not appearing on the official table. My name is on there, so that part seemed to go OK for me. On Insta, there are also mentions of goodie bags that didn’t appear. I can’t remember if we were supposed to get them but I didn’t see any.
The biggest problem with all this is how many upset children there were! I saw kids as young as four or five standing around, in cheerleader outfits and sequins, getting cold and wet while their parents wondered what the hell was happening. As this was the first (last?!) Swiftie run, a lot of people had travelled a long way to attend and there were also a lot of teenagers and 20-somethings who you could tell weren’t seasoned runners (I can mainly tell because I appear waaaaay higher up the results table than I have at any other race! Although that could also be down to all the missing results…). As one friend said “I’m so sad it went badly! This was my daughter’s first running event!”. When these sorts of events go well, they make people want to do more of them but there are now a few hundred kids who are quite likely to never want to run again: in fact my friend’s daughter of Titanic quip fame literally said this on the way home (then we had KFC).
Plus, it’s insulting to all the organisers of running events that go so smoothly and make it look easy: I’m thinking RunThrough, who regularly do events in Battersea Park and all over the place, and the numerous other big races I’ve been to (not least parkrun, who pull it off every week all over the world — for free!). Clearly, organising a running event is bloody hard, and it seems like those mysterious Run Fanatics bit off more than they could chew.
“We’re just a group of Swiftie fans who wanted to create a fun, themed run for fellow Swifties!” is what they said in one of their messages to me, and I almost felt guilty. Then I worked out how much money they had made, and decided to publish this post anyway.
Now we got problems
And I don't think we can solve 'em
You made a really deep cut
And, baby, now we got bad blood (hey!)
You should let Taylor’s Management know. I bet they don’t have permission to use her image etc. The queen won’t this one little bit and I reckon she will slap them with a hefty ‘cease and desist’ pretty quick smart
It’s really, really difficult to organise a running event (or any event) and make it look effortless to the participants. The bar has been set very high by parkrun events running like clockwork week in, week out. Their secret is keeping it simple with no promises other than free, weekly, timed. The volunteers at parkrun also know that it’s not a money-making endeavour and this really changes the vibe when they’re standing outside in the pouring rain cheering people on - one marshal doing it for the love of the event and community is worth a hundred who don’t really “get it”