DAVE Carroll and Barry Shackleton reached a magnificent milestone on Saturday when they completed their 200th parkruns.

The former has chalked up 173 of his runs at Bolton, with Barry running 74 of his on the Leverhulme Park course.

This week there were 266 runners, of whom 24 were first timers and 45 set new personal bests.

Thomas Fletcher, a non-barcode-possessing runner, was first across the line with Tom Lucas of Horwich RMI Harriers next.

Non-barcode-possessing Rachel Bailey of Bolton United Harriers & Athletic Club and Sarah Watton were the first females.

Brian Morris (75.99 per cent), Garry Bateman (74.13 per cent) and Toby Middleton (71.89 per cent) achieved the day’s highest age grade scores.

Continuing on the numbers theme, it is worth noting that since the Bolton parkrun began in February 2011, 4,707 different runners have completed 38,934 runs at the Leverhulme Park 5k course, 7,539 new personal bests have been set and 218 different athletics clubs have been represented.

On Saturday 25 rather soggy volunteers made this week’s event possible: Cecilia Woods, Hannah McArthur and Mick Entwistle arrived bright and early to help set up the course, before joining Adam Connell, Alan Sweatman, Brian and Megan Horrocks, Helen Harper, Jeff Pendlebury, John Ward, Mel Walker, Olivia Kearney, Paula Pilling, Phil Holden, Phil Glassbrook, Phil Worsley and Sarah Leaver to point and cheer the runners around the course.

Deb Hennessey and Rachel Gosling were tail runners to make sure everybody got back in one piece, I beeped runners over the finish line, Rob Short was funnel manager, Christine Pendlebury handed out finish tokens and Marisa Frot, Paul Duke and Shirley Tull scanned barcodes.

Jon Kennedy from Dartford and Dave Dalton from Poole parkrun were the tourists this week.

Runner of the week: Nick Haworth had a mad grin on his face at the end of the run, hopefully as a direct result of his new personal best time of 25mins 15secs, his first PB since September 2013.