If you’ve got yourself into this running lark under instructions from a medical professional, or you lost a drunken bet with a dubious friend that you couldn’t run 5k in less than forty minutes, or maybe you’re even having an early mid-life crisis, you could be forgiven for wondering why any sane person would actually pay good money to pull on a pair of trainers and go for a run. Well, like any hobby or pastime people engage themselves in it in varying degrees, but I must add here that no club member is or will be under any pressure or obligation to enter any race, so if you decide this business isn’t for you, that’s cool, we’re still more than happy to have you among our ranks.

So what’s stopping you, perhaps you feel anxious? Maybe you’re frightened of getting lost on the course (there are marshalls at road junctions to ensure this doesn’t happen) or getting laughed at if you come last (this definitely doesn’t happen), or needing the toilet halfway round (ahem, more on this later). You might be thinking to yourself ‘Why bother, I’ll never ever win?’ well, here at Faversham Running Club it’s the taking part that matters, not the winning, in fact, around 99% of runners will never win a race, but that certainly doesn’t make them losers.

• A change of scenery – it’s always refreshing to run somewhere new
• No route planning needed, just turn up and run
• Charity sponsorship – there’s probably not a runner in the country who hasn’t done a charity race once or twice
• To get an accurate measure of performance – runners love looking at statistics to see how they’ve improved* over the months/years (*or not as the case may be!)
• To broaden their horizons and move out of their comfort zone for a short while
• Running with friends or family – this can make for a memorable day out
• Medals – pretty much every race in the calendar offers a finishers medal, so even if you only do one race in your career you’ll have a memento of that day

Ok, so you’ve sort of decided you might dip a toe and see what all the fuss is about – but how does anyone find out where and when all these events are? Well, a good place to start is parkrun. It’s free, it’s local (Whitstable is our nearest one, followed by Canterbury and Sittingbourne) it’s 5k, and it’s every week. You can pretty much guarantee there’ll be at least half a dozen FRC runners at Whitstable every week. For me, what makes parkrun is the non-competitive, inclusive, non-judgmental atmosphere that prevails at their runs, the ideal fostering ground for new runners who are finding their feet and wanting to grow in confidence.

The club members’ Facebook page plays a big role in the club and people will tell you what races they’ve entered and if they have any spare car seats going which is often welcome. Please note there are two FRC Facebook pages, one is a private closed group where members post and chat with each other, and the other one is a public page where the club management post.

Another good source is the events pages over at Run Britain  at Runners World and Nice Work . You can search races by location and distance.

So you’ve clicked a few buttons on-screen, entered your card details and bam, your inbox now has confirmation that you’ve secured yourself a place in a race, your first ever race. It’s not unusual for a runners’ first ever race to be a marathon, yup, in at the deep end, doing the big one. Often this route will have been chosen with charity sponsorship in mind, London being an obvious example. Last time I looked, the London Marathon was about nine times oversubscribed and winning a place in the open ballot was an unlikely happening, thus making the charity route into the event much more commonplace. On a more achievable level, you might be aiming to complete a non-stop 5k run.