It sometimes easy to forget that SJ Running was only founded 7 weeks ago. We have been hugely supported by the SJ Leadership Team in getting us off the ground and for that we are enormously grateful for their help. In a period of just 48 days, as a group of collective runners we have clocked up over 3000km across 500+ individual runs. Put simply, that distance covers London to Istanbul. We hope that by starting to bring our community of runners under one umbrella we have inspired new runners to take their first steps while helping push our existing runners to even greater heights.
Autumn and run leads
SJ Running was founded on the principle aim of making running inclusive to as many people in our community. As we head into the hardest part of the running calendar, autumn and winter, we would like to focus on growing our group runs to increase frequency but also geographical reach for our runners. Stepping out individually for your run as the days get shorter and the temperatures drop, is one of the hardest things but if you are doing it as part of a community (the whole ethos of SJ), the motivation is greater. As one of our runners said to me, everything is better in Jamaat.
To this end, we are inviting run leads to come forward so we can offer you more. To be a run lead you simply have to be:
- passionate about running. We will support those who are less experienced in their running but have the passion to take group runs.
- able to commit to a minimum of 1 run every fortnight on a day, time and location that suits you (this can vary from fortnight to fortnight). We have a picked 1 in 14 days so this does not end up being a huge time commitment for run leads but allows us to maintain the professionality and structure we would like to build around SJ Running.
From September we would like to advertise group runs in our WA group for the week ahead with the basic information of date, time, location, and type of activity (duration, time period, intensity) so anyone interested is able to participate. As a run lead you may want to do a structured session on interval training, hill training or you may just want to head out for a social run with other guys in your area. If you are interested in helping us grow SJ Running either contact us directly or drop us an email at running@jafferys.org. We would be delighted to work with you.
2021 and beyond
Next year will give SJ Running its full crack at a full running calendar year. As we said a few weeks ago, the opportunities for us are endless and if things start returning back to some level of normality, we would like to offer our runners the chance to enter traditional running events as well as putting on our own events, so our runners have targets and goals to aspire to. We have no doubt, once you experience one event, you will be itching to sign up for many more. We had planned to run a Couch 2 5K programme but sadly the timings for this year did not work out for us and we will revisit this early next year.
As the newest member to SJ, there are some things we will get right and others we can improve on but most importantly we are committed to learning and improving the experience for all of our runners. Whether you are reading this as part of SJ Running or a member of another SJ sport, we would welcome any feedback whether positive or constructive to help us drive SJ Running forward.
Ali Momin and Ariff Sidik
SJ Running
To keep up to date about SJ Running activities, Strava Club (https://www.strava.com/clubs/StanmoreJafferysRunning)
