Mark passes on his golden baton to Victory AC colleague and fellow parkrunner Helen ...

Then, the following week, it visited Jersey.

Again, its stay was brief as last weekend it was at the Staunton Country Park in Havant.

And this Saturday it will be at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park.

Who knows where it will go after that?

The peripatetic item is one of 15 Big Community Relay gold batons that are currently making their way around the world via weekly parkrun events.

The batons all started their journeys at the Woodhouse parkrun in Leeds at the end of September - the batons are sponsored by the Leeds Building Society and have GPS trackers installed.

Victory AC member Mark Cooter was at the Havant parkrun last weekend to hand the baton over to club colleague Helen Boiling, who is planning on taking it to Queen Elizabeth Country Park this weekend.

Cooter had taken possession of the baton while taking part in the Jersey parkrun the week before.

‘I was just visiting Jersey, and I got talking to the lady who had been given the baton in Poland the week before.

‘I said I would take it back to Havant and Helen will probably pass it on to a tourist at Queen Elizabeth - they get a lot of tourists there as people like to collect all the letters of the alphabet and there’s not many Qs around.

‘Whoever gets the baton is purely random - some of the batons are currently in Australia I think.’

Laura Hodgkins, Head of Marketing at Leeds Building Society, said: ‘With the Big Community Relay we hope to bring together communities throughout the UK.

‘We’re hopeful that the batons travel wide to demonstrate the importance of communities.

‘In some ways, it’s less about the miles they travel and more about the communities they reach.’

Parkrun organises free, weekly, timed community events for runners of all ages and abilities.

Every week in the UK just under 200,000 people walk, jog or run 5km at parkruns, supported by more than 20,000 volunteers.