Race the Neighbours

This is the tale of a race with no finish line.

Ten years ago, my good pal Greg Swimer came to me with a vision – that we would build a special 10k race. It was an idea that brought together key themes of our lives – the two of us were both running obsessives, sharing a bit of friendly racing rivalry to spur us on through the years, and each of us is a man who likes a project. Greg’s idea had a lovely twist – the race participants would select a neighbourhood to run for – N2 for East Finchley and N10 for Muswell Hill, introducing that same friendly rivalry on an inter-postcode basis. And so, Race the Neighbours was born.

Now I bow to no man when it comes to my love of logistical spreadsheets, but I already knew from our time running a football team that Greg combines strong leadership with a slightly scary organisational vigour. Truly, he is your man if you want your trains to run on time. Or, indeed, your runners to train on time.

We put together an organising team – Steve, Avi and Elliot were our founding comrades, with El coming up with the race’s distinctive name and branding which set us apart from the start. Plans were hatched, a route was devised, a multitude of elements were gradually pulled together. We agreed to start small, with a limit of 250 runners starting and finishing in Cherry Tree Woods in East Finchley, by way of Parkland Walk, Alexandra Park and Highate Woods. Though the race scale was very modest, the details were many – insurance, race timing, medical provision, portaloos, countless other tasks that we only uncovered as we went along.

It was a lot of work, and as I headed down to Cherry Tree Woods at 5am on that first race day morning to help with the set up, I asked myself (not for the first time) whether it was worth the bloody aggravation. And then something wonderful happened.

On that bright morning of 7th June 2015, runners congregated, smiles on their faces, bibs on their shirts declaring their affiliation – N2, N10, or Just Running. They came together, old running friends and new, stretched together, lined up together and started running together. By the time the first runners arrived back to Cherry Tree Wood to be greeted by Steve’s booming voice on the PA, and the applause of their friends, family and neighbours, we already knew we were witnessing a minor community miracle. 

We built it and they came.

That first race was a resounding success, with the newly devised Cherry Tree Cup awarded to N2, and our all new strapline – “North London’s friendliest and most scenic 10k – with a dash of neighbourly rivalry!” a fair representation of what our race was all about. We had not established the race for profit or for charity, but when we realised that, even after the outlay of our (now annual) curry night / AGM extravaganza , we had made a small profit out of year 1, we donated the £80 surplus to a wonderful charity with operations in both N2 and N10 – North London Hospice.

It was clear that this race was destined to run and run. We planned for a bigger event, open to more entrants. The neighbourly rivalry element was such a neat idea, we talked of trademarks, of merchandise, of rolling it out to other postcodes. The world was our off-road running route.

We went again the following year, and Race the Neighbours was soon a firm fixture on the North London running calendar. Every year our vision expanded – with many of the original runners returning year after year,  bringing with them new neighbours to join the fun. Like a slightly younger and less drug-addled Rolling Stones, our original line up evolved, with Steve moving on (to New York, rather than a Brian Jones style untimely demise) and Marc, then Dave and Alain joined our organising crew. We built a charity element into our purpose, raising more for good causes every year.

By 2019 we had reached nearly 500 runners, and as we made plans to set the date for the following year’s race, we considered whether we could expand further without losing the friendly intimacy of the event. We consulted the 2020 diary to find a clash-free date, seeking to avoid Glastonbury weekend, my son’s bar mitzvah, and other key moments in the racing calendar.  

Well, you know the story of 2020. We launched the race at the end of February, and by mid-March, all bets were off. We cancelled, and again in 2021, and that could have been the end of Race the Neighbours. Like many events, we’d lost momentum, people had moved on, relaunching felt like starting again. It wasn’t clear that any of us had the energy.

We discussed calling it a day, and it looked like inertia had won until a member of our crew, Avi, wrote the Whatsapp equivalent of a Churchillian call to arms, citing love of the event and the need, following the barren years of covid, for just this kind of community event to bring people back together for a morning of joy. Avi’s words of passion won us round, and the race ran on. 

And so in 2022, our race returned. We expanded the postcodes to include N6 and N22 (so covering all areas of the race route). The organising cycle began each year with that sinking feeling about all the work that lay ahead, and ended in Cherry Tree Wood, as the final runners came in to huge applause, and our understanding that this was simply the best goddamn day of our year.

There’s a cliché about the rewards of putting something back in. The truism that we get so much more from our acts of community than from any more self-centred behaviour. It opens up an interesting philosophical discussion – if a selfless act is always gratifying, is it possible to be truly selfless? But that’s for another piece, my point here is that Race the Neighbours has been the model of a rewarding community event, a day of wonder for everyone involved in organising it.  

Having said that, we did eventually run out of steam. In early 2024, we revisited that perennial question – “can we be arsed?” And this time, with no barnstorming speech to talk us round, and with no succession plan to pick up the reigns, the answer was – no.

I sent out an email to our community to let them know that we were hanging up our start gun. There was an outpouring of grief, with many lovely emails thanking us for those golden years of racing. The Archer newspaper, which had supported the race from year 1, shared the sad news with the wider public. And that appeared to be that.

Until we received one more email, from the good folk at North London Hospice. They loved our race, and they had the structure to take it on and integrate it into their own events calendar. Greg and I met with them, they could not have been more enthusiastic. And just like that, the race was back on. This time we made the front page.

Besides the beautiful circularity of our first year charitable donee ultimately taking over the organisation of our race, it’s enormously satisfying to know that Race the Neighbours will continue. It’s not ours any more, in fact it never really was – running is always magic, but running together is a particularly potent blend of brilliant exercise and joyous community activity. It belongs to all our neighbours.

I look back on our glory Race the Neighbours days with enormous thanks to all my RTN team comrades under the masterful leadership of (other) Greg, to the many brilliant marshals who volunteered every year with huge smiles on their faces, and to North London Hospice (did I mention what an amazing organisation they are?) for stepping in and giving the race a safe future. And most of all, to every runner that ever came along and raced their neighbours.

May you race together for many years to come – we’ll be down at Cherry Tree Woods, through rain (possibly) or shine (definitely), to cheer you on.  

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