BOLTON went running crazy this morning when the town’s parkrun smashed its attendance record.

A massive 202 runners took part in the weekly 5k run through Leverhulme Park – 40 more than the local event’s previous record.

Organisers Rowan and David Ardill and Alistair McArthur targeted today’s event as an invitation to first timers to try to boost attendance.

And, with the weather staying kind, old and new runners flooded to the Bolton Harriers track to take part.

Rowan said: “We’re delighted with how many people took part today.

“We broke 200 which is fantastic, now we’d love to sustain it.

“Our numbers have grown gradually since we started. We had less than 100 for a while, then we broke that. We gradually got up to 130 then quickly went from there to 150.

“Last week we had 162 for the third time, which was our record, now we want to push on.”

The Bolton parkrun was set up 16 months ago to try to get people in the town running.

It is a free event which is organised and marshalled, and all runners are timed with their results sent to them by email later the same day.

A full list of the latest results – and of all previous runs – are also listed on the parkrun website: http://www.parkrun.org.uk/bolton/home.