'THE MEETING'....

Being older than i'd like to admit has allowed to experience the great of the Vancouver running scene (the era of Williams, Fell, Boileau, Hoogeworf, Duhaime, Lee, Pells, Nelson, etc.... just to name a few) and the current scene where there appears to be some big holes.

Over the last few years I'd always bitch about where things were and a couple of years ago I got the idea of trying to get a more, as i say, 'centrifigal force' in the Vancouver running area. We had a small group of people, but some were at points in their lives where running too a backseat and we focussed more on the suburbs and not the core vancouver area and eventually the group that had been building went kaput.

The drawback has always been the geographical size of Vancouver itself as we have some decent runners (Ziak, Mosley, Osaduik, Hayden, etc....) but we are all over the place so having some 'centrifical force' in regards to geography is tough.

After Ottawa Jerry Ziak and myself were not too happy and Ryan Day was not to pleased either. Much of it seemed to be around motivation and training partners, so we decided to have a meeting. During the time we decided and actually had this meeting Richard Mosley made the decision to come back to the westcoast (once a westcoaster...always a westcoaster), so now we were four deep.

Anyways to make a long story short we met over some beers and came up with a running template, some general scheduling ideas and a creed/philosophy of what we wanted, needed and expected. The idea is that if we four can keep things going 3-4 times every 2 weeks then we may be able to attract (at least some of the times) others who also feel the same way and get something growing.

I think we all left feeling better about the situation, but now we need to put ideas into practice and that (as I've found out) is always the most difficult thing to do. I am not sure where this is headed (some other people - Bruce Deacon and Steve Osaduik) have also expressed an interest, but alas geography and circumstance once again comes into play (Steve lives further out than me.... pretty much in the forests of Langley and Bruce has a family to keep track of...those darned families sure get in the way), but we'll see....


training since wednesday
thurs: 20min tempo and 6 x 30 sec hills
Fri: 58 mins
Sat: easy loop around mundy park 22 mins