Brenda Beckett, 68, and Gabrielle "Gaby" Hülgi, 80, completed their 500th parkrun on consecutive Saturdays in late April and early May at Roodepoort parkrun on Johannesburg's western edge, capping more than a decade of weekend 5 km starts and turning Hülgi into the oldest South African woman to reach the milestone. The pair, known across the South African parkrun community as the Galloping Grannies, have completed events at 125 different venues between them, with side-trips to Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States slotted around their core Saturday-morning loop on Roodepoort's North Riding industrial estate.
The pair's progression to 500 puts them at 155 and 156 on parkrun South Africa's all-time event list, a tally that has roughly doubled in the past five years. Beckett began her parkrun career in August 2013 at Uvongo on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast while on holiday, and Hülgi followed nine months later. Roodepoort, founded in May 2014, has been their home base ever since; Beckett alone has volunteered 86 times across 14 different roles, and run reports from the venue's regular team have long included a weekly tally of how many events the Grannies have left to go.
Their milestone arrived in the same week the University of Stirling's School of Sport published an updated analysis of parkrun participation through 2025, finding that the introduction of the parkwalker role has driven the largest single category of growth across the network. The Stirling team, which previously published the foundational "parkrun effect" research in 2022, found that older women now make up the fastest-growing demographic of regular attendees in the United Kingdom and South Africa, with parkwalker registrations more than tripling between January 2024 and December 2025.
Beckett and Hülgi sit at the intersection of those numbers. Both still complete most of their events as runners, but both have logged dozens of starts as parkwalkers since the role was formally added in 2022, and Hülgi told the Roodepoort Record that the option to walk "without the slight feeling of failure" that used to come with not finishing on the run had kept her coming back through two knee operations. Roodepoort itself has averaged 220 finishers a Saturday across the first quarter of 2026, up roughly a third on its 2019 pre-pandemic norm, with first-time finishers and walking participants the engine of that growth.
The Galloping Grannies' next stop is the 5 May edition of Bonza Bay parkrun on the Eastern Cape coast, where Beckett's daughter is the run director and where the pair plan to mark Hülgi's 81st birthday with a Saturday-morning run. Beyond that, the duo say they have committed to the parkrun world tourism milestone of 250 different venues — they have 125 between them now — and to taking the Galloping Grannies route on the road through 2026 and 2027. "You don't think about the next 500 when you start the first one," Beckett told the Roodepoort Record. "You think about the cup of coffee at the end."