How To Start a Running Club - 3 Simple Tips

So you’ve decided that you’d like to be a runner, you want to lose weight, get fit and just generally feel better about yourself. But you hate the thought of running on your own. Well you can stop worrying because here are 3 great tips for how to start a running club, so you have your own motivation, safety and company when you run.

First and foremost you need to put the word around with the people you know. Friends, family or work colleagues all provide an excellent network of potential running club members. Hopefully from this list you may get one or two people interested in joining.

From this initial interest, you need to decide on which days and times you’ll meet, because one of the most frustrating things you’ll find about organising anything is that you can’t please everyone AND not everyone that says they’ll come will actually do so.

If you only have limited times and days that you can run on, then these will be your running clubs times.

Initially it would be far easier to simply stick to just one day a week, then eventually if you have enough interest and your club grows in size, then you can run extra days of the week.

Once you have your set time and day organised you can move on to getting more runners.

Join Facebook or use your Facebook account and send out a message to all your contacts. Make it viral - ask all your contacts to pass the message on to their own contacts. Not everyone will do this, but if only a few do it, you’ll have literally hundreds of messages flying around about your new running club.

On the message you need to include the following details: -

• Is it a mixed running club or just for men or just women?
• Where you’ll meet
• How far you’ll run
• The standard of running
• The time and day

You can also send out an email to your contact list and again ask all the recipients to forward on to their own contact lists.

Another good place to put the word out about your running club is your work place, your partner’s work place, children’s school, playgroup or nursery etc.

If you live in a small village or town, put up posters in the main shops or libraries etc.

This in a nutshell is how to start a running club. Don’t be put off by an initial lack of interest, once you’ve been running for a while, you’ll find that the word will spread.

But remember once you begin, you’ll need to be there leading your running group every week, come rain or shine because it's the consistency that will attract new runners and so your club will grow..