The June Chair’s Blog

This is the first of the new monthly Chair’s Blogs, which I mentioned was something I wanted to do when I was elected at the AGM. Taking over as Chair means building on a lot of great work from all of the previous Chairs of our club, but also looking to build for the future, and hopefully these blogs will do just that. The aim of these is to give you guys a clearer insight into what we’re doing as a committee, because – let’s face it – minutes are boring.

I start my term as your new Chair with a lot of ‘new’ things – a new surname as Philip Fisher for one (although I don’t think I’ll shift ‘the Goose’ in running terms at least) – but more significantly we also have new people in all of the other officer positions – Secretary, Membership Secretary and Treasurer. This has meant that a lot of our initial work has been handover as a new committee – making sure that we’ve handed over our banking, membership systems, and boring IT stuff.

Of course I can’t mention June without the Summer Mile. While Kay has been finishing up her final year as Chair, she was also leading the Summer Mile team of herself, Sam Dooley, Trevor Raddings and Deborah Brown. These events can’t happen without our core Summer Mile team, our sponsors, and all of the volunteers. Along with our other events that bring in income including marshalling with Run For All, these events are absolutely key for our club financially.

One of the key things that we are starting this month is the introduction of Harrier Of The Month. Each year we award the President’s Award (for club contribution) and the Chair’s Award (for running performance). For Harrier Of The Month we will have two awards each month – a men’s and women’s award – and will be based on either club contribution or running performance, or both. You can nominate someone using the form we use for the annual award. This will help us to recognise the achievements of people throughout the year, and also mean we have plenty of nominations for our awards do at the end of the year. You should see a blog announcing our first recipients for June shortly!

There has been an incredibly hectic running calendar and some amazing achievements this month – far too many to mention without making me worried that I am missing anyone – but it has been fantastic catching up on everyone’s achievements when skimming the Facebook group for the weekly roundup.

One of the things moving forward that we will need more help with is our social sub-committee. We have one brave soul who has stepped forward to lead the team, but we need some more people to come on board and help. Get in touch if you feel you can help the team!

You may also have noticed that we have been a little short on leaders in June. This is not unusual as it is always a busy time for holidays, but if you have back marked or have run in a group for a reasonable amount of time and feel confident stepping up and leading a group, then please feel free to do so – it’s an incredibly rewarding thing to do and a really simple way to support your club.

That’s the Chair’s Blog for June – I’m looking forward to keeping you up to date with everything going on behind the scenes in the committee.

Happy running!

Philip Fisher

Hyde Park Harriers Chair