Chair’s Blog – July

Welcome to the July Chair’s Blog, giving you a bit of an overview on what we’ve been working on. For July personally things seemed to have flown by in terms of club stuff – you may know that part of my job involves graduation at Leeds Beckett University, so July has been a crazy month personally, and with not as much running as I would like.

Fortunately my amazing committee of new (and old members) have been brilliant and it has been great to see all the different things people have been picking up and taking on.

In my last blog I mentioned we are working on handing over our banking with our Treasurer handover, and we are very almost there. It might sound like it is taking a long time, but we are still going to set a record for how quick the changeover has been. If there’s anyone who is still waiting on invoices and so on to be paid – we will hopefully be in a position to be able to do everything very soon!

Talking about handovers, you will have noticed that Clare has hit the ground running now with her role as our new membership secretary, but there is another handover that you may not have noticed. The weekly roundup is now managed by Naomi Adkins and Zeni Bellwood – so if you have anything to submit, get in touch with them.

We have seen the amazing success of Club Run that was bought to the club by Amy Young and Nicola Forwood. We are getting feedback on that to influence what we do with our training activities. We’ve had ongoing conversations about our Tuesday and Thursday sessions around the number of leaders and number of people at different sessions or groups as we’ve been low some weeks. This will probably pick up after Summer, but in the meantime we are working on several things behind the scenes around resources for leaders, our leaders forum for later in the year, and putting more people through leader training courses. As a run club this is obviously our core activity and we’ll keep working hard to make sure that our sessions are the best they can be.

It comes earlier every year, but we are also thinking about Christmas, and the amazing Nick James who is leading our social events is working on the Christmas party (with assistance from several helper elves) – but if you want to help out and get involved with the Christmas party, or any other events, get in touch with Nick! For those who are just looking to come, watch this space for more information.

We will also be announcing details of our Open Committee Meeting, including the London Marathon club place draw, very soon – we would normally announce this slightly earlier in the year, but details have been a little bit vague about when ballot results are coming out and we didn’t want to book the event and then find out it was before they were out!

This is the last thing I’m doing (or writing) before I head to parkrun this morning and then head off on holiday for the next three weeks, so August in club will fly by for me again. In my absence I have appointed a Roman Triumvurate of the other club officers (Becky Gray, Clare Evans, Lorraine Beavis) to act with ‘executive authority’ on my behalf. I am sure the club will be in a better place when I return after it’s been in their capable hands.

PS. Turns out in Sydney you can do double parkrun every week as there’s a 7am-er (Centennial) within 3 miles of an 8am-er (St Peters)…

Happy running!

Philip Fisher

Hyde Park Harriers Chair