WRR Winners of Active Club of the Year 2024

On Friday 15th November Worlingham RoadRunnerz travelled to Trinity Park, Ipswich for the Active Suffolk Awards 2024 and were delighted to win 'Active Club of the Year 2024'!! We were thrilled to be shortlisted for the award and absolutely over the moon to win, it really makes everything we do worthwhile and proves that what we do for local communities is a great thing, keeping running inclusive for everyone and encouraging people to get out, get moving, make friends and enjoy their running. Here's our story:

Worlingham RoadRunnerz has come a long way and supported a huge number of local runners since being founded in March 2020.

Back then, we were engaging runners and keeping people active and safe through the pandemic lockdowns. We built up such huge momentum, and have not slowed down since! We have well over 100 active members and have recently grown our coaching team to a total of 15, providing development opportunities for our more experienced coaches to complete level 2 coaching qualifications and strength workout coaching qualifications to build upon the base level England Athletics Run Leader training that all coaches need to complete.

So far in 2024 we have run another beginners course, turning a diverse group of non-runners into regular attendees of our main training sessions. We have again put on a ‘return to running’ course which has brought along people who had gotten out of the habit of running for any manner of reasons. Earlier this year our 5k improver course gave motivation and a genuine plan for how to get faster to participants who had wanted to reach a higher level. For the first time, we are currently part-way through a 5k to 10k progression course, for those seeking to bridge the gap to longer distances. We offer regular strength sessions in an indoor sports hall and the occasional bootcamp – this is all alongside our general training sessions on a Tuesday and a Thursday evening.

We try to cater all sessions for all abilities, but training on the local school field allows even more opportunity for those who want to run at their own pace. Occasional pub runs that end at a local drinking establishment are always popular. But being a Worlingham RoadRunnerz runner is not just about Tuesday and Thursday evening training. Saturday morning parkruns, often at Lowestoft but reaching far and wide, become a sea of green and black shirts. We encourage our runners to turn out in large numbers to local races. Sunday mornings regularly include social runs, and we have a number of marathon runners who try to egg each other on to get the long miles in ahead of the Spring marathon season.

But perhaps the most personal of the many wonderful things that the group does together is in the fundraising events that we do for the Breast Cancer Now charity. It is a most strange coincidence that the two ladies who founded the group, have both had to face Breast Cancer diagnoses in the relatively short period of time that the group has been operating. As part of this, our Wear It Pink running events over these four years have raised over £6,000. Our events have included quiz nights, cake stands, flooding Lowestoft seafront with a sea of pink at Parkrun, and our team event brought out the most elaborate of pink outfits yet, but most importantly raised hundreds of pounds for charity.

We have more plans in the pipeline but our main focus is to keep running a friendly, social sport and to be inclusive and available to everybody, no matter how fast or slow and of any ability.