Hi Road Runners,
Do you feel it? Do you feel the increased energy in the club and the excitement that is starting to take hold at our events? I do & I’m excited about where we are going. Our last race had 118 participants – 14 more than the February 2006 race and the first time we’ve been over 100 runners in a while. Those 118 hung around after the race talking. It was fun to watch and to be a part of it.
Those of you who were there heard me talk about the club’s 2008 goal – increasing member participation in preparation to celebrate our 50th anniversary in 2009.
How are we going to do it? By focusing on a few key events and reaching out to current participants.
The plan is to build community through five established events and miscellaneous one time events along the way. The five events include:
- Trophy Series Races
- Tuesday evening fun runs
- Saturday long runs
- Summer Wednesday night Track workouts
- Fall Marathon Training Series
At these events, you’ll notice the board actively talking to people they don’t know – finding out what is going on with individual runners, why they came to the event & what they thought about it. Reaching out to people accomplishes several things – builds connections between new runners and the club, strengthens connections between club leaders and members, gives us new ideas, and puts some variety in our quest to talk about our own running.
While these five events form the core of RMRR, there are other ways to build connections. Those of you who went to “Spirit of the Marathon” with running friends experienced they type of camaraderie we want RMRR to stand for. Creating the camaraderie happens as we sponsor teams for larger races, blog about the great race we ran, and attend miscellaneous events as an RMRR group.
The club will also reach out to new faces by marketing our events more heavily:
- Kevin Downing, our VP of marketing, has created a flyer we can leave at running stores. The flyer talks about our events and gives the website address so new people can find our track workouts or our races.
- We’ve also got Kevin, Jim Chow and Dave Cunningham working on revisions to the website. The website is our main communication tool and these guys have a plan to make it easier to use. Current members will find info on our events and an easy way to access archived info. New members will see the benefits of the club and the upcoming events.
- We’re going to order some bowflag banners to place out at our races & events. Many of you are asked questions by passers-by – “Who are you?” “What’s going on here today?” Having a nice banner with a place for club info gets the word out. The banner we’re looking at is one like you may have seen at T-Mobile stores, Quiznos or at the Rocky Mountain Half Marathon. We want to readily identify our events as RMRR events and make it easy for someone new to find out about us.
As I said up top, I’m excited about where we are going. I feel the energy all of you are bringing to our events. I like walking around & hearing people talk about their ideas. There are so many things we can do as we gear up to Celebrate 50.
Deb