parkrun profile: Wondai

Wondai parkrun is based in a small rural Queensland town with a population of less than 2000 and recently celebrated its second anniversary. Being in a rural area, there are often cattle, wallabies and even camels to look out for each Saturday.

One of our smaller parkruns, with an average of about 30-50 participants each week, Wondai is always ultra friendly and welcoming to newbies and visitors.

It is a super easy course,  an out and back course on the 42 km long bitumen South Burnett rail trail. If you miss the turnaround, you could have a long run ahead of you!! Being a former rail trail, the course remains high and dry in wet weather, has no sharp corners or steep inclines, so it’s a quick course.

Wondai is lucky to have a couple of mature gents who love to volunteer each week and a fantastic eclectic group of Run Directors. The two Event Directors are Ros Heit and Mick Freeman who bring different skills to the team. As Ros said “When the rail trail opened it was too good an opportunity not to bring the wonder of parkrun to our little community”.

There is a free campsite nearby and many ‘grey nomads’ plan their adventures to include their weekly parkrun. parkrun has brought many visitors to enjoy Wondai, which was recently awarded the top Queensland Tidy Towns award. Having a parkrun contributed to winning this prestigious award by providing the town with a sense of friendliness and community spirit.

Each week the locals adjourn after parkrun to Dans Diner across the road from the start/finish line and always encourage visitors for coffee or breakfast. The Run Director uploads the results in Dans, so we have the honour of having some of the fastest produced results each week.

We would love to welcome you to join us one Saturday.

The Wondai parkrun website is here and their Facebook page is here.