Monthly report from Club President, Leslie Billowitch
The May showers flooded our parks and brought hail storms to the area. We are hopeful that mother nature will give us a break and that we will have an enjoyable summer.
Many of you joined us for the St. Luke’s Half Marathon, 5K and Youth Run in April. These races helped kick off our free running season. In May we had over 300 racers at the Summer Series, and over 550 kids at the Kids Series. Not bad for a local running club.
They say it takes a village and I couldn’t agree more. We are a 100% volunteer based club, so we rely heavily on all of you to support the 20 races we run. We know that all organizations are feeling squeezed and that volunteers are getting burned out. The Board has talked about reducing the amount of races that we offer to see if that would help strengthen our volunteer pool, but we love that the community is so active and we don’t want to see that momentum drop.
We need your help– we don’t want to threaten to cancel an event because we don’t have enough support. We hate sending out pleading emails but our main concern has to be the safety of all of our runners. If we don’t feel that we can put on a safe event, we will have to cancel.
How can you help– if you plan to race, then look for registration, parking or clean up duties. If your child is racing, why not be a group leader and get them to the start line. If you have family spectating, why not encourage them to be on the course, serve water or support the finish line.
We appreciate all of you and we wouldn’t be as strong as we are without your continued support.
We hope you will join us on Global Running Day, June 5th, as we host the 2nd Summer Series 5k. We are thrilled to also be hosting the GOTR 5k graduation race as well as the First Strides 5k graduation race also on that day. Please help us show these runners just how amazing our community is.