As Susie Dent from Countdown once said, “data is what we call facts when we’ve got too many of them to remember”.

Data was invented by the ancient Egyptians and really caught on, unlike huge pyramids and mummification, which have faded in popularity.

For thousands of years, people were perfectly happy just having data and leaving it at that. But then people added words like analytics and science to the end of it and numbers could no longer simply exist — they had to be understood.

These days, data is often described as “the new gold”, mainly because both are extracted from deep underground in a process called mining.

Rhubarb has only been in existence for a week, but already has around 4 million individual pieces of data related to parkrun.

Here are a few insights from that data:

When people sign up to Rhubarb, they get asked a very serious question:

A man offers you £1m to push a button, but won’t tell you why. Do you press it?

55% of Rhubarb members would press. 45% wouldn’t. The pressers? On average, their parkrun times are over a minute and a half quicker than the non-pressers.

Button-pushers are consistently faster, and it’s not just age. Even when you control for that, they’re quicker across every group, with the biggest gap in over-50s.

The likely explanation is that “pressing the button” and “absolutely sending the first kilometre” are essentially the same personality trait.

Parkrunners love an alphabet challenge. If I was the mayor of Xino Nero, Greece (population 907) I’d get a parkrun set up ASAP and see the tourist money roll in.

Around a third of Rhubarb members have completed at least one alphabet of unique parkruns, and a few have gone just slightly beyond that:

Around 90 Rhubarb members are just one letter away from completing their first alphabet. The problem letter? Z. It’s always Z.

Around 70% of Rhubarbers are cool with pineapple on pizza. Around 30% feel that it’s “sacrilege.”

The sacrilege group — the purists, the traditionalists, the Italians (probably) — are two minutes quicker on average (mean and median).

Why would strong opinions about pizza toppings make you faster at parkrun? Possible explanations: conviction (decisive people pace harder), temperament (pineapple people may be more easygoing and less competitive), or nothing at all. But the numbers point in one direction: put pineapple on your pizza, but it’ll just cost you two minutes.

We ask members for their favourite Quality Street, as required by UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

The Purple One dominates with around 20% popularity, followed by the Green Triangle (around 13%) then the Strawberry Delight (around 11%). The preferred choice of the quickest runners?

This makes complete sense. Milk Choc Block is literally just chocolate. No filling, no drama, no complexity. It’s a chocolate that says “I have a training plan. I monitor my VO2 max. I wake up a couple of hours before parkrun and have a carbohydrate-based snack before putting on my light-weight shoes”.

None of this proves anything. But it does suggest that if you want to run a faster parkrun, you should make slightly more questionable decisions, develop strong opinions about pizza, and avoid fudge. Which feels like a solid framework to build a life around.