I think it takes time to build a good run club.
When the pandemic hit a few years ago, it was everything we could do to hang onto the little collection of people we had accumulated in the years leading up. We had Zoom calls, we met in a big parking lot where we could social distance, and we pushed to maintain connection through the adversity and advice of society.
Many clubs didn’t. Our club was an offshoot of a club that had gelled inside the local running store from people doing drop in runs and taking clinics. We brought it out into the parking lot and coffee shop, but when the pandemic shut everything down that little kernel of a club popped and disappeared.
It took nearly three years before they even tried to restart it.
And six years later it is just starting to feel like the old days. I was running with the rekindled club just the other night, a dozen of us who are no longer just a bunch of strangers dropping in on a weekday evening for a quick tour of the neighbourhood. It had that feeling where you come early to chat and then stay after, too, again to chat, getting into each other’s lives and listening to work stories and vacation tales and training struggles.
It took us almost three years to get that back.
