What do you do if you and your friends have caught the running bug, but you’re traveling for half the year? How do you be part of a community? You build your own while on the road. That’s what Andy Rush has been doing within and alongside one of the most thrilling, exclusive sports around.
Andy is a Formula 1 mechanic for Aston Martin, you see. He’s been “in some sort of pit lane” since he was 16, when he attended the National College of Motorsport and duly got an apprenticeship after three months.
A generally fit and active guy, he’s only been running for a couple of years, but he got the bug quickly. With 24 Grand Prix races in a season, where he’s away from home for over a week at a time tinkering with gearboxes, it was impossible for him to keep his parkrun record intact.
While he was with the team around the world, the friends that Andy started going to Banbury parkrun with started a healthy bet to see who could get the fastest parkrun time. A competitive bunch. Andy was feeling left out, especially because he thought he was faster, but couldn’t prove it. So he started training. From 5Ks to 10Ks to running the Cleveland half marathon in-between the Miami and Montreal marathons in May.
Happier taking his running shoes with him rather than searching for a decent gym, Andy soon noticed other members of the F1 paddock crew – the people in the pit lanes poring over data or frantically changing tires in seconds during those races chronicled on Drive to Survive – were running. At the same time, upon hitting 30 years of age, Andy realized that the way he interacted with a new city was more run club than nightclub.
I’ve written plenty of times about how running through a new city is the best way of getting to know it, and that’s what Andy did. Getting the runners among the pit lane crew together for a social run around the city was the plan for race six: the Canadian Grand Prix.
The result is Pit Lane Shakeout, a traveling race-week social run club that connects Formula 1 crew with the cities and communities that they find themselves in.