The Compass Clubnew tourist club

Appears in 15 episodes, first in episode 27.

Every appearance

• Episode 249 - Becky Maybury

  Prompted by Finland's forthcoming most-northerly event, the hosts discuss whether there is a global Compass Club and how you would even define the most easterly and westerly parkruns on a round planet - date line, clock, or flat map. Melissa Ellis notes the Australian Compass Club is about geographic extremes, not events with compass points in their names. They put the question out to listeners and nominate Peter Pohlman as the man likely to know.

• Episode 191 - Dynamic Duo

  Follow-up discussion of Lyndell's proposed unofficial "Vert Club", which tracks cumulative elevation across parkruns. Mel admits she didn't do her homework on her own total, and raises the problem that GPS devices report wildly different elevations for the same course (40-44m vs 10m at Kawana); listeners are asked to name a survey-data site that could give accurate course elevations. Peter Pohlman, "keeper of the spreadsheets", is credited with looking up Tenzing Norgay, prompting a suggestion that the club's "Sherpa" level be renamed after him. Gerard adds that Indigenous people would have climbed Mount Kosciuszko long before any European.

• Episode 190 - Chasing Vert

  Prompted by TOC's macropod club idea and Matty Trent's report from the brutally hilly Mundy Regional, Lyndell proposes a new unofficial club for chasing elevation gain, the Vert Club. Rather than a fixed set of events, runners accrue total elevation across all their parkruns towards three badge levels: Kosciuszko (2,228 m, the Strzelecki badge), Everest base camp (5,380 m, the Sherpa badge) and Everest itself (8,848 m, the Hillary badge). Worked examples: 59 Bunyaville parkruns, about 47 Nambour, just over 42 Mundy Regional, or 1,114 Wynnum parkruns to Kosciuszko level. Mel adopts it on air ("Yeah, I reckon. Vert Club") and takes on a project to total her own climbing since 2012, with Lyndell to send the rules to Peter Pohlman for his unofficial-clubs spreadsheet.

• Episode 172 - Rohan Day

  Prompted by the Marina launch, TOC points out it "may alter some of our clubs". Mel realises the new WA event will become the westernmost point of the Compass Club in Australia, wiping out her Margaret River claim, on top of already missing the southernmost after her "[Geeveston] malarkey", so she now needs return trips to both WA and Tasmania, the two furthest points from her.

• Episode 136 - Kelly Hodges

  Mel flags her Tasmania trip as the final leg of her own Aussie Compass Club, heading to Geeveston parkrun, the southernmost event in Australia, to complete all four compass points. She dismisses the alphabet-style clubs ("that's not a real compass club"), Scott counters that he's in one, and Mel appeals for a graphic designer to help with artwork for the medals she's having made.

• Episode 121 - Mark Musk

  Mel notes the Geeveston launch shifts the southern Compass Point for the third time this year and is the last point she needs to become a navigator. She proposes that anyone holding all four compass points simultaneously should keep navigator status permanently even after the points move, and announces she will make engraved navigator medals, pending agreement from her co-conspirator Chris/Christine Timms.

• Episode 100 - Lyndell Murray

  Discussed inside the launches item: Nightcliff is "a new point on the compass club", prompting Mel and Scott to observe how expensive the club has become now that compass points are being replaced almost weekly as parkrun Australia expands toward the coasts - contrasted with the Peel Club, where one event per state or territory suffices.

• Episode 82

  Melissa Erbacher breaks news of upcoming compass-point changes: Western Australia's point shifting from Geographe Bay to Margaret River, and a new Tasmanian event launching in January that will create a new southernmost point. She then rules, with co-creator Christine Timms, that compass points are fixed by the start/finish pin rather than the furthest extent of the course, settling the Kingscliff vs Ballina Coast debate in Kingscliff's favour. She notes she is a co-creator of the club but not yet a Navigator herself.

• Episode 65

  Discussed inside the Kingscliff interview: Mel points out Kingscliff is currently Australia's easternmost event and asks whether the Compass Club has brought extra visitors. Dawn hadn't heard of the club until recently. Talk turns to the upcoming Ballina-coast launch, said to be 500 metres less easterly, and to Weipa having challenged Darwin for northernmost, with Mel noting that being bumped out of the club by a new launch is "another adventure to be had".

• Episode 59 - Nicola Forwood

  Scott and Mel refine the listener-proposed Pirate Club that was floated in episode 58 ("your friend from the West"). Rules locked in after consulting the originator: seven "C" events (the seven seas) plus one "R" event, "You have to have done the seven C's and an R ... it's the letter that comes immediately after Q in the alphabet." The original 26-C proposal was judged unattainable. Ian Hay is later tasked with crunching the numbers ("Seven seas and one R ... I'll crunch those numbers") for a reveal next week.

• Episode 58

  Mel reveals a new Adventurer Club dreamed up by a Western Australian, at an airport: the parkrun Pirates, for anyone who has run "all the Cs", every parkrun beginning with C, and, after she pointed out the pun, all the Rs as well. You can be an Australian pirate or an international pirate. She has put the question of how many events that actually involves, and whether Australia has any pirates already, to Ian Hay for next week's Facts in a Haystack. Headlines the episode's show notes ("explore islands and talk about pirates").

• Episode 49

  Delivered inside Facts in a Haystack. The Peel Club now has 15 members with nine added during 2016, none of them from Queensland or New South Wales, and 17 people sit one event away. The Compass Club has two members, Brendan Peel and Neil Barnett, with 18 people one event short, most of them needing Geographe Bay. The four qualifying events are Darwin, Hobart, Kingscliff and Geographe Bay. Mel reports she has checked and Margaret River is at least six months from launching, so a Compass Club place would be safe for a while.

• Episode 30 - Hamilton Island

  Melissa: "Congrats also to Brendan Peel who recently became a navigator joining the Compass Club when he ran Kingscliff parkrun two weeks ago." Part of a short round-up that also congratulates the Run Beyond Project girls on the M7 West Link Blacktown Running Festival 10k and New Farm parkrun on its 250th event.

• Episode 29 - Jessica Trengove

  Update on the newly launched Compass Club, inside the Facebook round-up. Mel reports suggestions for what to call members who have done all four compass points of the country, Peter Pohlman [Pohlman] and others suggested names such as travellers; Nicholas J. Sando suggested "navigators". Mel and Christine, "my partner in crime in creating the Compass Club", have both settled on navigators. Michael Scott's review also mentions being intrigued by the new club.

• Episode 27 - Dani McLaren

  FIRST APPEARANCE of the Compass Club. Mel and Chris Timms (Launceston) invent it over dinner at Main Beach on the Friday night: visit the easternmost, westernmost, northernmost and southernmost parkrun events in Australia. As of this episode those are Kingscliff (E), Geographe Bay (W), Darwin (N) and Hobart (S); the hosts note it will change as new events launch (Byron Bay would take the eastern point) and that an Alice Springs event would one day give it a centre. Mel and Chris drove over the border to do Kingscliff the next morning specifically to bank a point. They also ask listeners to help coin a name for members ("compassions?"), by analogy with the Southern Cross Circuit's "stargazer".