Last Saturday, more than 8,700 Melburnians and visitors to the city sprang, rolled or dragged themselves out of bed on a cold winter's morning.

All with a common goal in mind — to find themselves at the starting line of their local parkrun course by 8am for their weekly 5-kilometre run.

For the uninitiated, parkrun began in London in 2004 and the free, volunteer-led community events have since spread to more than 20 countries around the world.

You can find parkruns — and junior parkruns for runners between the ages of four and 14 — at 520 locations around Australia.

Melbourne is undisputedly Australia's parkrun capital with the city host to 49 parkrun events.

By comparison, there are 34 parkruns in Sydney and 20 in Brisbane.

The philosophy behind parkrun is simple — it's a run not a race — open to everyone whether you run, jog or walk your way around the course.

For Wendy Glen, founding Event Director of Gardiners Creek parkrun, parkrun's enduring popularity is due to its ability to allow members of the community to connect with others in nature.

"Some people go to coffee afterwards, some parkrun but don't talk to others. It's a bit 'you do you'," she says.

People can choose how fast they want to do the course or whether they'd prefer to support the event through volunteering.

"Either way you get to be part of a tribe, which meets a fairly primal human urge."

All that notwithstanding, surely there's room for some friendly rivalry between the different parkruns that call Melbourne home?

Let's delve into the data to see how they compare.

Which is the most popular parkrun in Melbourne?

Albert Melbourne is clearly Melbourne's most popular parkrun by number of participants.

Perhaps not surprising given its inner-city location, flat course around Albert Park Lake and its history as the first parkrun established in Melbourne.

But you're unlikely to be short of running buddies regardless of which Melbourne parkrun course you call home.

The top 16 courses in Melbourne last weekend each attracted more than 200 participants.

Which one is the speediest course?

By adding up the time each parkrunner took to complete the course and dividing it by the total number of participants who received a time — remember if you forget your parkrun barcode you won't get a time! — we can determine the mean or average time it takes someone to complete each course.

By this measure, Lillydale Lake was Melbourne's speediest course last weekend with the average parkrunner completing the course in 29 minutes and 55 seconds.

Close on its heels was Parkville parkrun only four seconds behind.

You could argue this is an inexact way of calculating how speedy a course is because it doesn't take into account the relative ages of the parkrunners taking part.

Well parkrun also provides age grading, allowing participants to roughly gauge how their parkrun time compares to someone else of their age and gender.

Age grading gives you a percentage score of how close you are to the world record time for that age and distance.

Let's see how the mean or average age grade score compares across different Melbourne parkruns.

Interestingly, Lillydale Lake still takes out the top ranking but the rest of the events in the top 10 have either changed position and three have dropped out entirely to be replaced by new ones.

Of course, this is not a perfect measure either as it fails to take into account local conditions at each event, like the number of hills to conquer in each course — we're looking at you Westerfolds parkrun!

But hopefully it provides enough data for some cheeky banter over a post-parkrun coffee.