Why Club Running?
Something between an introduction and an explanation
Running is not a difficult sport to understand. The athletes line up shoulder to shoulder, wait for a signal, and go... somewhere. That "somewhere" can be anywhere - sometimes it's up a mountain, others it's down a straight line. Sometimes it’s just a whole bunch of circles around the same loop. Occasionally there are little fences to hop over or puddles to splash around in. It's all very whimsical. In the end, however, it's all just basic geometry: here's point A, here's point B. Who can move between them the quickest? Pythagoras would like a word.
Some people can get from A to B really, really fast. Sub-4 miles, sub-13 5ks, even a sub-2-hour marathon! Others, while significantly less fast, are still a helluva lot quicker than most of us. Every high school in America has a handful of kids capable of putting down times that would have the rest of us passed out on the side of the track.
But the beautiful thing about running is that the barrier of entry is essentially zero. It's a point so often belabored that it's become a cliche, but it bears repeating: to become a runner, you don't need a team, a coach, specialty equipment, a facility, or even a modicum of God-given talent. I am walking proof of this.
At no point in my childhood was I considered particularly "athletic," nor did I really care to be. I was an active kid - an avid backpacker and a decent JV Volleyball player - but sports had never held any appeal for me, at least not as a serious pursuit. I had always felt a mysterious sort of draw, however, to distance running. Not so much as a sport, I suppose, but as an undertaking. A means to test my limits. There was a brief phase in the 5th grade where'd I'd start every recess with 8 laps around the (supposedly) 200m track that encircled my elementary school's soccer field. My best time was 9:31, a mile PR that went unbroken until an ill-advised Turkey Trot sometime in high school. When I was 16 I had briefly considered joining my school's Cross Country team, but it only took one miserable jog in the depths of a Virginia summer to banish that thought from my mind.
I started running (for good this time) in September of my sophomore year of college. I'd tried on-and-off for years, but this time, finally, it stuck. My first run was a pancake-flat mile through Colonial Williamsburg. It was the dead of night, but it was still nearly 85 degrees. I ran 8:51 and immediately had to sit down to avoid passing out. Within 3 weeks, I was hooked. Within 3 months, I had run 10k a few times without stopping to walk.
Then COVID hit, and like so many of us, I quickly found that running was about all I could do anymore. I went from running 3 times a week to 5, then 6. My mileage steadily climbed, I started doing workouts twice a week. By the fall of my Junior year, I was consistently running 40-50 miles a week, completely solo, simply for the love of it. I had never raced in my life. I enjoy running alone, but the effort of spending up to 8 hours a week on the roads was starting to get exhausting, not to mention lonely as hell. My freshman roommate's older brother had been part of a campus running club, as I recalled, and he sure seemed to like it. I wasn't the fastest, or even the average-est really, but I figured I'd shoot them an email.
Team Blitz welcomed me in with open arms, and suddenly this sport made a whole lot more sense to me. Group long runs, workout partners, the excruciating joy of racing - for the first time in my life I was a member of a team, training my ass off for a sport I loved. When I joined Blitz I had a 5k PR of 24:24 and I was going on runs with everyone from sub-16 guys to 4:30something milers to 3-hour marathoners, and - here's the kicker - they didn't drop me1.
Collegiate Club Running isn't just for wannabe walk-ons and aging grad students fresh out of NCAA eligibility (though both such groups are present and vital to the competitive scene!). I've met once-promising high school runners who were plagued by injury at the time it mattered most but refused to walk away with unfinished business. I've met genuine talents who, though they could have easily run in the NCAA, were sick of the pressure and just wanted to learn to love the sport again. And I've met plenty of people like me: new to running, sitting on a wide range of natural speed, and more than anything just happy to be there.
My first (and so far, only) track race was an intra-squad mile race last Spring. It was a strictly for-fun, low-pressure event while NIRCA - the National Intercollegiate Running Club Association - was still out of the picture due to COVID. Finishing times ranged from the 4:40s to the low 8s. I ran a 6:21 that day, and I distinctly remember clapping (and, even more aerobically ill-advised, whooping) as I got lapped. As soon as the winner crossed the line, he turned around, understandably out of breath, and started screaming his encouragement at the rest of us.
This is a league for athletes with no motives other than simply getting better. Club running is for people who love to run, who want to push themselves for no reason other than to find their own limits. Some of those limits are fast - really fast. Others may be less so. We're all still here to run till we puke, and dammit I think that's beautiful.
Club running is rarely reported on, if ever. Yet it has some stiff competition, albeit free from the suffocating seriousness that tends to surround much of collegiate running. The winning times at XC Nationals this year were 24:41 over 8k (run by Pitt's Nick Wolk) and 21:37 over 6k (run by Princeton's Savannah Carnahan). That's nothing to shake a stick at. There were also plenty of people at that race who ran a whole lot slower and still had the time of their lives. Both of these stories are worth telling, and if nobody else is going to tell it, then I suppose I will.
On easy runs, that is. On workouts, I am often still summarily - and rightfully! - dropped.
This is completely and utterly epic