Club Run with Devizes Running Club
19 December 2016
Devizes Running Club is a 120 member running club, based in the heart of Wilshire and welcomes runners of all abilities. They meet on Tuesday and Thursday nights for structured Speed work and a Tempo run.
England Athletics' Club Run programme is a free initiative specifically aimed at supporting road running clubs. Club Run offers participating clubs a free series of practical coaching sessions led by a member of the National Coach Mentoring Team or a coach from the National Coach Development Programme with experience in road running.
The reason Devizes Running Club applied to join our Club Run programme was to develop structured training within the club, especially Speed training, and develop the Club Coach Damion Godwin. "We were very guilty of just turning up and running."
Club Run Coach Bryan Clinton conducted an active warm up and a Pyramid session during the first session to an audience of about 50 members. This started to make everyone think about pace management, the feedback after the session was very positive from all the members. The next 2 sessions continued with Active warm ups and mixing distances of 1200m, 800m and 400m at either 5k or 10k pace.
Devizes Club Coach Damion Godwin has worked closely with Bryan and now has the confidence to deliver sessions on a weekly basis. The club are hoping to keep Bryan on as a mentor to Damion and maybe come back every 2-3 months to deliver a session and see progress. Bryan told us, "The work I have done with Damion has helped him and he has more confidence as a coach. I do feel that they have some athletes who have the potential to win races certainly on a local and regional level with the right guidance and commitment, the commitment would come from improving results. I have encouraged the club to look at race planning and identifying races and training accordingly."
Devizes Running Club Chairman Simon Gilbert - who has already reduced his 10k time by 2:30 and taken 5 minutes of his Half Marathon PB - said, "Bryan has transformed the training within the club, it has enabled the participants to think in terms of an athlete instead of just a person that runs. Bryan's love and enthusiasm for athletics has certainly been obvious to see."
The Club have lots of members competing in the Bath Half Marathon, Reading Half Marathon and London Marathon in 2017, so the plan is to take everything they have learnt from Bryan and put into their own training schedules for these events. Many don't train enough to see the real benefits but if there's a programme in place there's the opportunity to improve.
Simon summarised, "Thanks to England Athletics for involving Devizes Running Club in the Club Run initiative, it's a fantastic opportunity for small clubs like ours to move forward in developing runners."
