The children, Henry (13), Julia (11), Penelope (9) and Genevieve (7) woke up at 6am and donned their festive attire, ready to take part in a six-year running family tradition said mum Jen Hodgson.
Families and fitness fanatics lined up to race at 8am for the annual Christmas parkrun, with clear, crisp weather to greet them.
Parkrun is a free, 5km long, community run held at the Dunedin Botanic Garden, every Saturday.
Special events are held for Christmas and New Year’s Day.
"We’ve sort of made it into a Christmas tradition, we’ve done it I think six years in a row," Ms Hodgson said.
She said getting the children ready for the Christmas morning run was easy. The hard part was getting them to sleep beforehand.
"The kids are getting more into it; that was their choice with the dress-ups."
Her son Harvey would speed ahead during the races, and she said he usually outran her when he took part in the family runs.
"They were super excited. It’s quite cute because we’ve done it so many years in a row. They hold out with opening presents until after," she said.
Ms Hodgson said she and her husband had always been interested in running and biking, but it was the community and friendships she forged during their times exercising with others that made them want to pass it on to her children.
"We really just enjoy the community aspect, its basically all our friends there all the time.
"There’s just a big group of extended family."
Event organiser Tania Hollis said the Christmas parkrun was very popular, with more than 130 people taking part in the early morning activity.
The event had to take a pause between August 14, 2021 and April 9, 2022 and therefore racers missed out on last year’s Christmas run.
"This year has been pretty intense, and the kids managed to do the whole 5km," she said.
She said the holiday season had attracted runners from all over the country, as parkrun is a global series of events and visitors would often join in.
"A lot of people will do their own park regularly and if they’re away they’ll plan to parkrun there as well."
There have been more than 400 parkrun events in Dunedin, with almost 50,000 individual 5km runs completed, she said.
