Chairman's Chat

Hello everyone. I hope that you and you families are well and that you are feeling positive about the months ahead. Lockdown 3 has been testing. I have missed the regular, weekly commitment to a run that comes with leading a club night and I have found it easy to find excuses not to go for a run. When I do find time and justification for a run, it tends to be a long one. I guess that's my way of compensating for the drop in the number of runs I currently manage each week. As with previous lockdowns, the TeamEGRC challenges help keep me motivated and seeing others participate is heartening. Thanks to everyone who has devised and looked after a challenge or just got involved, they've been great fun.

So it's not long now until we put these challenges on the back burner and restart club nights. England Athletics have said that we can recommence club activity from Monday 29th March, in line with the government's lockdown easing. We discussed restarting club nights at a recent committee meeting and there were no objections to a restart. The Run Leaders are ready to restart but we have fewer fit and able Run Leaders than we had when we were last active. A handful of members have expressed interest in becoming qualified as a Run Leader and they have been looking at online courses offered by England Athletics to achieve the qualification. "The Leadership in Running Fitness course is designed to prepare you to provide a safe and enjoyable running experience for young people aged 12 and adults of any ability. The course covers risk assessment, warm-ups, cool downs, and how to lead fun running sessions for a mixed ability group of runners." It's not technical, you don't need a degree or even a GCSE in order to pass it. What you do need is a willingness to help other runners and the confidence to lead a group. We would like more Run Leaders in the club. We will have a short-term shortfall in Run Leaders and I hope that a couple of the Run Leaders-in-waiting get qualified in time to help out in the next few months but irrespective, longer term we will need more members qualified to lead; having more Run Leaders allows us to do more things as a club and look after more runners. Please do consider whether this is a role that you could fulfil and please do get in touch if you have any questions. 

Our current crop of Run Leaders will have a Zoom get-together next week to thrash out the details of our restart. When we have a plan, I'll let you know. This will be in the form of a club-wide email, not a Newsletter so do look out for it.

Of course you will need to have renewed your membership to attend a club night. Our memberships all expire on 28th February each year and if you haven't yet renewed, strictly speaking you are not a current member. We know there are many mitigating reasons why members are yet to renew and we aren't going to boot you off the members-only TeamEGRC Facebook page just yet but please do renew before you try and book onto our club sessions later this month. Renewals emails were sent by outgoing Club Secretary Ceri Sharples from the secretary@emersonsgreenrunningclub.co.uk email address in the second week of February. If you need a reminder, send an email to this address (which is now being looked after by incoming Club Secretary Anne Burge) and we'll send you the details for Eventrac, our new membership and subscription payment portal.

For many of us it will be tough to pick up our running where we left off. We all stayed at home when we were told to but unfortunately our homes have fridges and cupboards packed with food, comfy sofas and Netflix. I don't expect to be anywhere near my summer 2020 fitness when club night return, but that just means I'll have more milestones to enjoy on the journey back to peak fitness. 

I can't wait to see you all again and I long for the day where we can all huddle into Changing Room 4 without the fear of catching something nasty.

Keep on running.

Neil - Club Chairman