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Im looking for a good club in Manchester. Ive been running for a couple of years and have signed up to do my first marathon in April and was hoping someone could suggest a good club to join to improve my training
Thanks
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Hi!
It depends where you are based in Manchester as much as anything...Sale, Trafford, Salford, Stockport amongst others have plenty to offer. Most, if not all, provide for a wide range of standards. I am linked with one of the clubs, but can recommend the others as well and have contacts in most of them. Email me if you wish via the message facility (click on my name to go to the link).
As alehouse said, it depends on your area, but as well as that I would suggest that other considerations might be how "serious" a runner you consider yourself to be, your budget, and how important it is to be in an affiliated club.
As a suggestion you might like to look at the parkrun results for a given week and see which clubs are popular in the results - try Heaton Park parkrun for North Manchester or South Manchester parkrun for, well, you get the idea. Also there are other parkruns if you're further out. Better still come along to a parkrun!
So for South Manchester, http://www.parkrun.org.uk/southmanchester/results/latestresults/ . I'm a bit biased as I've found the Chorlton Runners to be a friendly bunch with a good variety of people training for different races at all levels. The club isn't affiliated (although they are looking at getting affiliated), but they welcome anyone who wants to join in and there's no membership fee, so just turn up and run.
I also run with the Sweatshop group from the Arndale, which again is friendly, free and well attended.
Just google for more details of either.
Hi Tarantula!
Actually I emailed with more details...including a mention of Chorlton Runners.
Just out of curiousity, how many run in the Sweatshop group, and what sort of distance/speed etc (although I'm getting ahead of myself as I am just recovering from an achilles op!).
Hi there.
Regarding Sweatshop, last week was a record - new year's resolutions I guess - 101 runners! If you know the shop you can probably imagine that's quite a crowd.
There are two Tuesday night runs, 5k and 4-5 miles - the mixed units still niggle me - both starting at 7pm after meeting at 6:45ish. Pacewise, people tend to go at what they're comfortable with so the crowd does split up but with that many runners there are always people to run alongside and chat to.
The routes are described (in a slightly haphazard way) at the briefing, but there's always a back marker who is happy to go at the pace of the slowest runner, so if anyone does find themselves unsure of directions the advice is to wait. Some people are very much beginner-runners, especially on the 5k route, so it's quite accessible.
Some of the usual routes are on here: https://maps.google.co.uk/maps/user?uid=214477322717381135786&hl=en&gl=uk&ptab=2
By all means come down when that achilles is better, and if you register and do 5 of them you get a t-shirt!
Sounds fun, and thanks for the reply!