Running Club

Despite being in trial for most of the week, I was able to get in some good running and see some friends. I ran a few miles at Memorial Park on Monday. Then on Thursday I met a friend to run 5 miles on the trails. After getting cleaned up, I joined some people from the running club for our club meeting. We had elections and a group of great members were nominated and selected to serve this year. Friday I ran 7 miles at the park. I planned on running 14 but the sun was setting on me a little quicker than I was running.

Members of the Dallas Running Club have set up a program where they sponsor Marines abroad in their running. It sounds like a pretty good plan where they assist other runners and connect them to a broader running community.

The plan is to have each Marine assigned a Dallas running buddy, who will communicate long distance, offering marathon training tips, accountability and encouragement leading up to the club’s DRC Half in November. Wherever the troops happen to be the day of the race, they’ll set up a 13.1-mile course and, hopefully, run it simultaneously.

This is one of the things that running clubs should strive to do — connect with other runners and would be runners in their community. Just because someone is abroad serving for our country doesn’t exclude them from being in our community.

It’s a pleasure to see that a lot of the runners in the 7 Hills Running Club have recently jumped into the running blogging community. Our club is lucky to have such a diverse and talented collection of runners. I’m happy that a few of them have joined me to write about what running means in their life and to tell what is happening in their running. You’ll find a link to many great 7 Hills blogs have been added in my blogroll.

I went for a quick five mile run today at the park. When I got there I saw that a group of cars, all of which belonged to members of the running club, were in the parking lot. I knew they were out there somewhere, so I ran the opposite direction they run. I passed them about 2 miles into my run and then met them as they finished.

It was nice to see them, but I realized that I miss running with the group. I like talking to them and enjoy the occasional run with them. I’ll have to join up with them later this week to have a nice little run.

My running club has a mixture of road running and trail running enthusiasts. It tries to draw an effective mix of the two with various scheduled runs but that cannot work.

The problem is that the head of the running club sets up the schedule so that he can make it to the various runs. This inevitably means that there won’t be enough scheduled runs to please either the trail runners or the road runners and we will chose to run together apart from the club.

Hence the renegade trail running group was born. We started out meeting at various times that were scheduled and at times that there weren’t scheduled runs so as to not interfere with the road runners who might want to join us later.

It didn’t take long before we just started to schedule runs as we please. This has effectively turned us into a separate running club that is merely an extension of the bigger running club. I’m not certain, but I would guess the road runners have begun something similar, although, they are less organized and not as rebellious.

I’m happy to say that the renegades, as we are called, have created our own t-shirts. I’ll have to snap a picture of one to show the new shirt.

Today I went to the Memorial Day club run and picnic. The run was an untested 5K course through a neighborhood. Although, or maybe in spite of, my time being a little over 25 minutes, I believe the course is actually longer than 5K.

After the race, we all hung out and talked with each other. We reconnected over great hamburgers and hotdogs. I enjoyed getting to see some of the runners that I don’t often see on the trails.