There are probably easier ways to prepare for the second day of a data conference than setting an alarm for 5:35 in the morning.
Especially when the previous evening has involved a Databricks social, followed by MotherDuck’s Duck In, Duck Out afterparty, and you’ve only arrived back at your hotel after 11pm.
But this was Big Data LDN, and for the fourth year there was another appointment in the diary: our morning run around Hyde Park before day two.
And these runs have become one of the highlights of the conference for me.
Since I don’t drink, getting up the next morning wasn’t the challenge it might otherwise have been. After a bus back to the hotel and a hot drink, I was asleep before midnight.
My alarm went off at 5:35. After a quick shower, I was straight into organiser mode and heading out of the hotel to walk across Hyde Park.
I love cities at this time in the morning.
Walking across Hyde Park while most of London was still waking up, the sky was only just beginning to brighten. The paths were quiet and the park had that slightly different character it gets before the daytime crowds arrive.
There’s something about early starts that I’ve always liked.
It’s perhaps the same feeling I get in the mountains in winter, or used to get riding a motorbike through the colder months. You meet a particular sort of person out there.
Someone who has decided that, despite the darkness, cold, snow or simply the attraction of another hour in bed, they’re going to do the thing anyway.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, knowing where your towel is tells you something about a person.
Perhaps turning up in Hyde Park at 6:30am wearing running shoes tells you something similar.
This was the fourth year we’ve done the run.
The original inspiration came from Major George McRae, who organised the original Big Data London run, and we continue to use the route he devised around Hyde Park.
For me, though, the run has become about much more than covering five kilometres before breakfast.
It’s about people.
Data conferences are obviously about technology, ideas and learning, but increasingly I find that the conversations around them are every bit as valuable as the formal sessions.
A run creates a particularly good environment for those conversations.
There are no exhibition stands. No presentation slides. Nobody trying to squeeze an elevator pitch into thirty seconds.
You simply run alongside somebody and talk.
This year our little group contained an old friend, along with someone I originally met through these runs and have subsequently run with several times, and Ben, whom I was meeting properly for the first time.
Exactly the sort of mixture I’d hoped these runs would create.
We’d had plenty of interest beforehand. There had been messages and conversations about the run, although inevitably conference logistics, and probably the attraction of staying in bed, reduced the final number on the morning.
That really doesn’t matter.
I gave my usual brief reminder that this was simply a social run rather than an organised event led by qualified run leaders, and then we headed off.
The eventual numbers tell the story quite nicely:
5.16 km
33 minutes 9 seconds
Average pace: 6:25/km
Fast enough to feel like a morning run, slow enough to hold a conversation.
And we did plenty of that.
Some of it was inevitably about the conference and the data world. Some was about running, work and everything else that tends to emerge when you spend half an hour alongside someone rather than standing opposite them at an exhibition booth.
We call it the Big Data London Sunrise Run.
In previous years that description has occasionally required a little imagination.
Not this year.
As we approached the Round Pond, the sky started changing.
What had been a pleasant early morning suddenly became extraordinary.
Orange and pink spread across the clouds above the park and reflected almost perfectly in the still water below. Ducks moved across the pond through the reflections while other runners and walkers stopped to look.
So did we.
For a few moments, the run stopped being a run.
Phones came out. Photographs were taken. But mostly we just stood there enjoying it.
There’s something particularly enjoyable about a shared moment like that. None of us had created it or planned it. We’d simply happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
We continued on towards the Serpentine, along past the lido and around the familiar Hyde Park paths before turning back towards where we’d started.
The conversations carried on as we ran.
Before long, the Albert Memorial appeared again in front of us, with the Royal Albert Hall illuminated behind it.
There was time for a bit more conversation, a group selfie and the inevitable realisation that we all actually had a conference to get to.
We said our goodbyes and headed off.
For me, that meant a hearty breakfast, a little yoga and stretching, and then back into Big Data LDN for day two.
There was just one problem.
When I returned to the hotel, there was no water.
Not no hot water. No water at all.
It turned out to be a supply problem affecting the whole hotel and a couple of neighbouring properties. I felt particularly sorry for the reception staff. There really isn’t much you can do about something like that in a corporate hotel full of guests expecting showers before heading to work meetings.
At that point, I was particularly grateful I’d decided to shower before the run.
For me, organising these runs is partly about fitness, but that’s not really why I keep doing them.
It’s about community.
It’s a chance to meet people differently, reconnect with people I don’t see very often and welcome someone new into the group.
And it’s a small way of giving something back to the data community that has given me so many friendships, conversations and opportunities over the years.
You can meet hundreds of people walking around a large conference.
But sometimes it’s the four people you spend half an hour running around a park with at sunrise that you remember most clearly.
So that’s another Big Data London run in the bag.
Four years and counting.
And we’re already planning the next morning run for Data Decoded in Manchester.
I’m fairly sure this little tradition has some distance left to run.