Thanks to everybody that took the time to complete our recent members survey. Our original plan was to get this summary out to you in the very next Relay, but with everything turned upside down that clearly hasn’t happened.
But even though we can’t meet and train together right now, that doesn’t mean we can’t plan for all the amazing stuff we’re going to do together once’ we’re through this.
What we need more than ever right now is positivity, and you delivered in your droves with the amazing and constructive suggestions you gave us.
Overall, I think it’s fair to say we are diverse bunch of runners, but what ties us all together is a love of running and a desire to retain the heart and soul of what makes us Romsey Road Runners. The challenge for the committee and session leaders comes from the fact we have members on both ends of a number of spectrums:
- Some want shorter session, others want longer ones
- Some want more change and variety, others want consistency and familiarity
- Some want more fun and social running, others want focus and structure
The secret will be in trying to offer choice, whilst not fundamentally changing the nature of the club – a challenge we accept!!
Training: When it comes to Mon and Thu training the preference is, just marginally, to try and keep to these two days but offer more variety of session types.
In terms of the types of new sessions we could add they all seemed popular; but strength & conditioning, winter-track, coached sessions and cross-country come out top.
Looking for quick wins we are planning to some new session types, when we are able. As ever we encourage you to give them a go and provide feedback:
- A return to meeting at Woodley Hall for Mon Braishfield sessions now we can run out on the new pathway
- An optional cross-county training session every other week run alongside regular sessions, led by James Battle and Steve Geary.
- A 10-week strength and conditioning course led by Becky Tovey
- And for later this year/early next year some structured training programmes for particular races/distances led by coaches Becky and Ian
Social: The clear theme around social events was for us to just try some different things and a larger number of smaller events throughout the year. Lee & Steve has some great ideas, including combining the cross-country sessions with some social elements in the summer – look out for the run/pizza/beer combo!
Relay: Whilst Relay is clearly loved, a number of you raised the issue of going digital and asking if there was a more modern way to share news from across the club. Well, they do say that necessity is the mother of invention and the new blog that has evolved over the past few weeks is evidence of that. And we are already trying to accommodate some of your suggestion for content; recipes, book/podcast reviews and a focus on a wider range of distances and event types, etc. I am sure Relay will be back before too long, but maybe in a slightly different format??
Kit: It would seem that on the whole you are happy with the kit offered by the club, but Tam is going to look into options for some sort of zipped/hooded top to be worn over our running kit for travelling to and from training and races. We also loved the idea of a sew/iron on badge so we could customise our own pieces of kit.