Is joining a running club right for you?
Hi, and welcome back to the Mohsin Salya blog.
I prefer to run alone. I’m a runner who enjoys the peace and quiet, and the opportunity to step out of daily life for a while as I exercise. And if I’m honest, I also find it difficult to talk while I run – I like to push myself as much as possible, and sometimes the effort often means holding a sensible conversation can be a challenge!
A shared experience
But I know that for many people, running is a social experience – or at least they would like it to be. I’ve been in races and run in charity events before where I’ve passed old friends (and new) chatting together for the whole length of the course, using the event as an opportunity to catch up. I’ve seen families out running together, using the time out on the course as a chance to reconnect and to spend the kind of quality time with each other that isn’t always easy in our modern world.
However, we don’t all have families and friends who are willing (or able) to join us on our runs. So, what are the alternatives?
Is a running club for you?
The first and most obvious option is to join a local running club. There are thousands around the country and you’ll find your nearest with a quick Google search. But why bother? Well, of course you’ll get to meet other runners and have a bit of company out on the road. But you’ll also get more variety built into your training schedule and perhaps begin to see yourself as more serious and committed runner than you did when it was simply a lone pursuit.
A collective approach
The example of a group of runners in New York offers an alternative to joining a formal running club – simply forming your own collective of friends to run with you regularly, with a loose approach to creating routes and the emphasis firmly on seeing the area where you live through different eyes. “It became, ‘let’s run where nobody else does and see things that nobody will’,” says Mike Saes of the New York Bridge Runners collective. “That’s always been my trick to running — the visuals.”
Another option – a kind of halfway house between informally running with friends and joining a running club – is to head along to a Parkrun. I’ll be focusing on these in another post soon.
Until the next time,
Mohsin Salya.
