We have been given permission by Birmingham City Council to hold our fifth 10k event on Sunday 16th September 2018.

You can enter online now for the reduced price of £10. On the day, the fee rises to £15.

We look forward to seeing you in September. Please share, tell your friends and family. If they don't want to run, we would love to see them supporting you on the day, and we can always use some help if they want to volunteer. Contact [email protected] if you are interested.

We have had confirmation of the date and entries are now open for The Handsworth Park 10k Fun Run 2017 on Sunday 17th September.

To guarantee a place please register online before the 10th September and benefit from the advance discounted adult entry of £10.
Paper forms are available by calling 0300 330 3322.

​The Pete Hayes Handsworth 10k Fun Run has been an amazing experience for all of us as organisers, particularly for my father and I, to be able to be involved in such a force of positivity which has carried the name of my brother. It has been a privilege to have him remembered in such a way and it has given us as a family a focus where the effect of losing Pete left us in great pain, feeling lost in trying to make meaning out of something that cannot make positive sense. The feeling of uplift from being among the community of people that have turned out to support us is truly and deeply appreciated, it is indeed invaluable. I cannot personally imagine where my emotions and reactions would be placed without this event taking over the best part of the last 4 years of my life.
It is in the mood of this deep appreciation that we began discussing the future of the run. After 3 successful years it certainly seems we have established ourselves in what we set out to achieve, and we have certainly become part of the running calendar of a great many people. We certainly want to continue the event as a legacy to Pete, as it reflects the best parts of the person we remember – warmth, happiness and the capacity to bring people together and send them away happier than they began.
We have been afforded so much joy on each of the 3 Sundays on which the run has taken place so far that we cannot really repay anybody for their support, for the consent people as a community, especially of Handsworth as well as further afield, have given us to remember someone so dear to us and help us through the personal trauma of loss. It has helped to heal some of the things that can be healed so it feels selfish in a way now to keep hold of this positive experience just for ourselves. We want to do the only thing we can do to really show our appreciation to the community of people that have done so much for us, which is to give the emphasis of the event back to the community it takes place in.
For that reason, we will be changing the name of the run, starting with the event we are organising in September 2017, to the Handsworth Park 10k Fun Run. This will always be Pete’s run, because without him we would not be here to talk of an event in the first place. If it had not been for Tonia and Rachel asking my father whether we could organise a run in Handsworth Park and to name it in memory of Pete, it is hard to imagine what else could have lifted those dark days. The focus of the run organisation, especially the formation of the Boathouse Runners has connected us to the community in a way that had not happened for us before. In a way this connection filled voids, affected our feelings of loss, in a way that reminded us of the way that Pete connected with people. His legacy will remain in our fundraising for the British Heart Foundation, in the positive atmosphere we always hope to maintain and the fact that we have been brought into the heart of our local community, the neighbourhood where we grew up by the memory of his spirit in life and we will be here as long as we keep a community of supporters to join us every year.
It feels the right time to make this change and I look forward to continuing this gift in my life as a gift to a place I love, for people I love for being there and making this all happen around me. You will notice the name changing, but we hope to keep everything else which has worked so well the same. Especially the cake and samosa stall at the finish line!
John Hayes (on behalf of the organisers of the Pete Hayes Handsworth 10k Fun Run).

We're only just getting over setting up and staging our first 10k run in Handsworth Park, raising money for the British Heart Foundation. Firstly we would like to thank all of our runners for their support by entering the run in the first place, and for the many messages of thanks and enthusiasm that we received on the day. None of the organisers had ever set up this kind of event before and it was great to get your feedback. The overall message was that the event was very friendly, well organised and that the course itself was quite a challenge, especially the two hills every lap leading to the railway bridge. So well done to anyone who managed a PB or managed the 10k distance for the first time, you really didn't have it easy. We hope that your experience of the event was positive. We as organisers have already met this week to feed back about the day as the memory is fresh and to look forward to staging a 10k run again next year. So we have been thinking about what went well and what we could do better, so if you have any suggestions that may help us, no matter in what capacity you experienced the event, please email [email protected] as this would be gladly received.

We have uploaded the results of the run onto the website, and we have uploaded photos to the website as well as our Facebook page. The photos really capture the atmosphere on the day. They were taken by Andy Davies, a professional photographer, and he has done a great job to make many of the runners look wonderful even at times when they were neither looking or feeling wonderful! Andy was generously hired by Andrew Bullock, a close friend of Pete's who set up the photography as his contribution to our event. Our heartfelt thanks go out to both of them.

There may be the odd glitch with the timings that have been published, if there is anything glaringly wrong with your time please reply and let us know and we will try to sort it out. Many thanks to Kier Finnegan who devised and ran the timing system which ran incredibly well and was one of many fantastic pieces of work by people to make sure that organisation costs were minimal and the donation amount from your entry fee will be as high as possible.

We were very pleased to see so many members of our Boathouse Runners group finishing the 10k. It was a real achievement for many who had only just taken up running in the last few months, we have only been going since April! There was a great sense of community with so many people cheering each other on. The familiar faces were also added to by the Saheli Women’s group, who had more than 10 entrants on the day and looked wonderful helping each other out and celebrating their success together at the end.

There was a medal for every runner at the finish line as well as the water. The logo was from an original design by Thom Hill, which was kindly inked and finalised by John McCrae, and the magnet medals were crafted with materials donated by Dudley College. The work to produce them was undertook by Kerry Williamson, Hatty Sutton and Emma Hayes. Our thanks go to all of these people who volunteered their time and skills to make them. We are concerned that some of you may not have been funnelled through to receive one. If you did not get a medal just email [email protected] to let us know and we will send one in the post.

The water given out at the end of the run was kindly donated by Aquarius, a local substance misuse charity.

We had T-Shirts printed by a local company in advance of the run this year, for the organisers and contributors to the run, mainly to wear while walking or running around the local area to spread the word. They looked quite good though, and many of us were sporting them on the day, especially as a gift bought by a family member for the members of Pete's family that took part in the run which held so much significance for them. If you would like to have your own to remember this year's event, there is a paypal button on the website to order them. They cost £15 including P&P within the UK; we are only charging the cost to order the printed T-shirt and send it to you. If you order one we will arrange to send it to you as soon as possible.

Please stay in touch with our webpage, our Facebook group or our Twitter feed to keep in the loop for news of the next event in 2015. We have been left so positive by the experience that even though we are all burnt out by the amount of things we had to do in the lead up, we are already applying to the Council for use of the park next year, so we will definitely be doing it again. Hopefully bigger and better from the experience of this year. We would not have been able to do this without the support of our families, as we have devoted a lot of our time to arrange the many aspects of the event, and the many people who gave up their own time to help us with the event on the day, and in the lead up to the event. We are especially grateful to Donna Stokes, regional events manager at the British Heart Foundation, who helped in many ways and was there on the day too.

In just online sponsorship so far, runners in this years event have raised £5,120.01. Added to that is over £500 from on the day entries and approximately £150 from the cakes being sold near the finish line. When the final amounts are tallied with the proceeds from the advance registrations we are likely to have raised well in excess of £6000 for the British Heart Foundation. That is a tremendous success and we're sure you should feel proud to be a part of that, as we certainly are.

It was a great day together, a great day for charity and a great day for Handsworth. Thank you so very much to everyone who was a part of it.

From the organisers of the Pete Hayes Handsworth 10k Fun Run 2014:
Tonia Clark
Rachel Chiu
Tony Hayes
Emma Hayes
John Hayes

We had T-Shirts printed by a local company in advance of the run this year, for the organisers and contributors to the run, mainly to wear while walking or running around the local area to spread the word. They looked quite good though, and many of us were sporting them on the day, especially as a gift bought by a family member for the members of Pete's family that took part in the run which held so much significance for them. If you would like to have your own to remember this year's event, there is a paypal button below to order them. They cost £15 including P&P within the UK; we are only charging the cost to order the printed T-shirt and send it to you. If you order one we will arrange to send it to you as soon as possible.

Make sure your address is up to date on Paypal for postage and that the email you have linked to Paypal is one you check regularly as we will reply ASAP to any orders.

The list of the times for all of the runners taking part today have been published on the website. Go to www.handsworthpark10k.weebly.com/results to look them up.

Thank you again to everyone who made today's event a great one. See you again in 2015?

Registration in advance to enter the Pete Hayes Handsworth 10k Fun Run this year has closed. You can still enter on the day for £12, the registration desk opens at 9am on the 14th September. Thank you to all of the entrants we have so far, there is a good crowd of runners already making sure the day will be fun and filled with atmosphere. Most importantly, we are sure of raising a good amount of money for The British Heart Foundation through the entry fees alone. Special mention and thanks must go to the many runners that have set up Justgiving pages, which combined look to have raised well over £1000 for the great cause we are supporting. This does not even account for the paper based sponsorship that people are doing as well, which will add to the total.

We are getting the final preparations in place for the Fun Run on the 14th September. We look forward to seeing you all there and having a fantastic day together.

We are currently drawing up a list of volunteer jobs we need for the day of the run, Sunday 14th September. We will need marshals and many other jobs that you could help us with on the day, for our run in aid of the British Heart Foundation. It would be a way to do your bit, especially as running the 10k distance is not for everyone.

If you would like to express an interest or find out more, please email [email protected].