Our SNI running club on Strava keeps expanding. We’ve got 12 members now and counting. Two people are committed to marathons in the fall, and two of us to half-marathons.

Somewhere in reading about marathon training I read that the community aspect of the training plan is one of the most important: finding a group of people around you for mutual support and motivation along the way. Proper training (aside from the physical effort) is time-consuming and requires consistency to get 4 or more activities in per week, without falling off the wagon. It certainly helps to have the visibility of those around you keeping their habits going as a motivator to push yourself.

When we do our semi-annual All Hands events with the whole team in the office for a week, we now have something of a tradition of doing a group run sometime when we’re all together. I think we’ve done it for 2 or 3 years now pretty consistently. It looks like the upcoming November event we’ll be mobilizing about 15 of us or so to get out there and do at least a 5K. There’s a half-dozen of us that are real active and do this routinely, but it’s awesome to see the communal gravitational pull working, attracting many to join in who are really just trying to get moving on building the habit.

This’ll be right after my half-marathon, so it might be the first recovery run after that race.