There’s a cinder track 3 blocks from my house and I’ve had a love/hate relationship with it for years. It’s at a small high-school-turned-middle-school, and because there are bigger schools in the area, with more money and more students, this track was never updated to the all-weather synthetic surfaces that make things easier. It gets messy with almost any weather. In the summer weeds sprout up around the edges. Tiny pieces of cinder make their way into your shoes, always. But that sound. Nothing beats the sound of picking it up on cinder.
After tackling laps and laps of cinder, I decided it was time to join my local track club. I ran in college, DIII, and hadn’t been part of a real running community in years. So I looked into it. Tuesday nights, 6pm. Meet at the track (a big fancy one, not the cinder stand-by). This club was started years ago by the late U.S. Marathon Champion and Colorado Running Hall of Famer Jane Welzel. She wanted to create a fun, family friendly environment that fostered a place in the running world for everyone. The range in age is 15-75, and the range in pace is just as varied. Plenty of burning lungs if you’re after that, plenty of PRs. But also a reminder that running with other people is fun — it makes you better in a way that you can’t achieve alone.
The club also sponsors a no-nonsense race series from October to April: Tortoise & Hare. With a race each month, the distances grow from 4K to 12K. The slower pace runners start first, and then the faster paces “chase” after them. Your pace from one race determines your pace for the next. So, each race you have a predicted time that you’re trying to beat. The whole atmosphere fosters bettering yourself more than competing with others. After the first two races (a 4K and a 5K), I absolutely love it. No swag, no packet pick-up, no lines. Just arrive on a Sunday morning with your timing chip and wait for your wave to go off. I was pleased with 21:44 for my 5K, and it already has me itching to get back under 21:00.
Cheers to community, to keeping in simple, to getting out there to see what you’ve still got.