Building a Community Around a Shared Love

A little over a year ago, I started hosting a weekly social run on Sunday mornings.  It started with some friends from our local Team Red, White and Blue chapter doing a group run in preparation for an upcoming relay race.  Between this run and my recent attendance to a free Saturday community workout, The Killeen Community Games, I got the idea that a regular running group would be something that the community would like and I love the idea of being able to share something I love with other people.

Over the past year, I’ve met so many new people that have come to the weekly events for the chance to run, the accountability, and the friendship that comes from running together.  I’ve seen so many of my runners sign up for races, some first time racers, some first times at new distances, including ultra-marathons and trail races.  In July, I scheduled the first trail run for a Sunday morning and we had more than 50 people attend.  By the end of August, I began scheduling the trail runs for every other Sunday and they have remained very popular since then.

While I was coaching the Grabbagreen Running Team, I was able to speak with Pam from The Austin Trail Running Company and she offered to help schedule shoe demos with two different companies.  For one, Phillip from ATRC brought shoes and for the other, we had a representative directly from a shoe company visit.  Both events were big hits with the running team and it was so nice to show the runners what kind of resources were available to them in our area.  It was also great to have such support from the running community.  

I spoke with Pam again at a race and she offered to come out again with another shoe company to do a demo for the Sunday morning run group.  After looking at dates, we settled on a Dana Peak Park trail run on Daylight Savings Day and Pam was able to get HOKA ONE ONE to come out to the event.  To say that I was excited for the group was an understatement.  I love that I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some amazing people in the running community and their generosity is inspiring.

I pushed this event through every social media outlet I could think of.  I shared it on my own page, several local group pages, and talked about it every chance I could to people face to face.  As we neared the date, I worried that the weather or time change might have a negative impact on the event but the day turned out to be absolutely beautiful and the trails, while a bit muddy, were great.  We did have to modify our route, though.  There is a gate that is sometimes closed that caused us to run about one mile on the road to get to the trail head.  We had to do an out and back on the fence line trail because our normal return trail was still flooded.  

Runners arrived shortly before sunrise and Pam from ATRC and Melissa from HOKA set up the demo shoes.  Melissa brought the Speedgoat 2 and Torrent models and she and Pam spoke with the runners about which shoe might be best for them to try based on their current shoes and preferences.  They brought more than enough shoes for everyone that wanted to try them out.  We took our normal pre-run photos, including my traditional half faced selfie with the group in the background and started our run.

The Half-Face Selfie!

I asked my photographer friend, Ashley, to set up early on the trail to get some action shots of the runners.  I will sometimes get photos on the trail runs with my iPhone but I’m always a little disappointed with how they turn out and wish they could be better.  I had wanted to get photos of a good sized group on the trails for a while and I thought this was a great opportunity to have someone out there with proper gear.  I’m still waiting on the bulk of the photos but the couple of shots Ashley was able to get for me were fantastic.

The social media push and word of mouth for this event was successful in getting the attention of a number of new folks to the event.  It was nice to run alongside some of the new people and get to know them a little.  We had some experienced runners that were new to the area and looking for something like our group as well as some first time trail runners.  It’s always exciting to see new faces at these weekly events and I love that this community has continued to grow.

The event turned out so well and I’m still trying to unpack how grateful I feel.  Before we left on Sunday, Pam offered to come out again early in 2019 for another demo. 

There are times when I’m so happy and a little disbelieving about how lucky I am to be in a position to coordinate things like this.  Other times, I wonder what more could I be doing.  For more than three years, I’ve shared my personal story of weight loss, health, and athleticism.  I think it’s a good, positive and strong story (I might be a little biased) and my feelings have changed from just being grateful that I’ve been able to tell it to feeling a responsibility to inspire and help others that would like to make changes in their lives.  Being able to share something I love with people while helping them is just a dream come true.

"Running has given me many things, but the greatest gift has been the people that it's brought into my life."

Run Hard.

Be Grateful.

Celebrate Love.