Club members should now have received formal notification of the club’s rearranged 2020 Annual General Meeting. We are hosting it virtual (using Zoom) on Thursday, 18th June, 2020. If you haven’t received the email, please check your membership, or contact the membership secretary – or another Trustee – if you’re uncertain. There is full copy of the agenda, and background to the AGM, on the club members’ forum. For background, a full copy of the 2018-19 Trustees’ Annual Report and accounts is available, and (with addresses redacted) is available our website. In summary, as well as a few standard AGM items, such as the financial update from the Treasurer, and the President’s report, the Board are proposing some important motions for members to review, discuss and consider, and cast their vote on: Reviewing and confirming our annual membership fees. This was scheduled to happen in any event, but the advent of the Coronavirus crisis means we wish to fully confirm with members. Supporting, in principle, relocation to a new training base within Bellahouston park Supporting and endorsing the Run Equal campaign, with a view to campaigning for full equality of gender at cross-country races. The Board proposes the club adopts the suggested Run Equal motions. Outlining the past and present relationship the club has with the Renfrewshire AAA, and how that may work in future. Supporting the efforts of the Board to engage with, and help creation of, a cross-country League in the West District of Scotland. Reviewing and approving the Board’s nominations for members to receive the title of “Honorary Lifetime member“ Review any member submitted motions that are received (together with two seconders) on or before the 15th March, 2020 Reviewing and appointing the Board of Trustees We’re hosting this virtually due to the Coronavirus crisis. We are endeavouring to use practices from our own experiences from working-from-home, but we really want to make sure this works both as a formal meeting we need to host as part of our charitable status, but also as a fun way to come together. Members who are unable to attend, but wish to be recorded in the Apologies, should contact the club secretary. The Board look forward to welcoming members on the 18th April to engage with this important annual event for the club.
Monthly archives: May 2020
The Glasgow Times recently had a great article about our virtual challenge participation success, and social media efforts! Do check it out if you missed it. Find it at: https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/18472139.bellahouston-road-runners-race-difference/
We thought it’d be fun to write up some of our favourite club sessions and routes, to perhaps give a few ideas and inspiration, or take a look at in more detail. The club’s full training schedule is on our website, and detailed each week by our coaches during the lockdown, via social media. We’re grateful to Niall Murphy for his excellent twitter posts and pictures, that served as the inspiration to this first post. Sherbrooke Hills A core session for our winter training schedule is the Sherbrooke hills. We’d even suggest it’s one of the very best hill rep routes in Glasgow: we even have members, who’ve moved away or further afield, comment to us of their “fond” memories of the session, and all the hard work. To borrow a term from cycling, it’s perhaps the Queen of our training sessions. It’s well worth hunting down, to create memories of your own: have a look at the map, or read our summary below, or why not become a member of the club, so when we resume our winter training schedule we can introduce you to it properly! The Strava segment helps visualise it, but: It starts on St Andrews Drive/Dalziel, right next to the lampost adjacent to ‘Somersby’. Head up the punchy (first!) hill, turning left on Nithsdale Road, then next left (by Sherbrooke castle). Head up the Sherbrooke Avenue hill (second!) – the famous three parter. Continue over the top, and down a bit, turning right on Springkell avenue just by the postbox (watch out when it’s wet). Continue down, then next right on Hamilton Avenue, up the steep (third!) hill, turning right and continuing up as it levels off. Turn right again, to the junction with Springkell again (by the postbox), but this time turn and run back up Sherbrooke Avenue for the fourth hill. Then it’s a brief downhill for a bit, taking the second right down Hamilton avenue, and first left to complete the loop at the junction with Dalziel. Club sessions are generally a timed tempo hills session (eg. 30 minutes), a number of loops (3-4), or efforts on the uphill/recover downhill. Do watch out for leaves in the autumn months, which – with some intermittent lighting – can absure uneven surfaces, ties. Roads can sometimes be busy too, so be sure to be careful, and wear highviz, and of course give way to others on the route, and during coronavirus, take care to follow applicable rules. A guided tour For those who know the Sherbrooke hills as a classic, we will all have found ourselves peering up at some of the houses whilst doing the session, thinking (perhaps initially) Is there a story to that house? – Pollokshields is Scotland’s first Garden Suburb, so if you’re on Twitter Niall Murphy (@MurphyNiallGLA) is well worth a follow for interesting and engaging stories of the architecture of this neck of the woods. A few highlights to look up next time you’re along. This whole thread […]
🥳Congratulations and a huge well done to all our Bellas who took on the Scottish Athletics Virtual Challenge – The one mile time trial – which took place from 8th – 11th May. 🤩 We were again the largest club by participation! A whopping 77 Road Runners took to the streets over the weekend to see how fast they could record one mile and there were fantastic performances all round 💜👏 We say it every time but it’s really hard racing yourself – amazing effort from EVERYONE!🤩 💜Among a host of great performances, our ladies masters team finished 2nd in their category with our other teams just outside the placings. Awesome job Bellas!! Not only has it been a busy weekend of running, we’ve all had a busy weekend getting on with our housework 😜. Some of our talented members got together to create a fun video of everyone doing their household chores. We really can’t wait until lockdown is lifted so we can ‘Break Free’ !!! 💜 Enjoy!! 🤩🎥 🧹 🧼 🎶💜
Time for another update! We’re hoping to make these rollups of what members, and the club, have been up to a regular thing whilst we’re in this strange lockdown situation. Members should now have received the full May 2020 update in their mailboxes, and it’s also published on our club members’ forum. The last month or so has been really busy for the club, with lots of ideas and inspiration and it’s hard to know where to start! Club member Alan Digweed has been a force of nature with his hosted Facebook Live video quizzes. An amazing achievement that was loads of fun to take part in. Alan, and fellow Bella Marty Campbell put together this amazing video on ‘Running Etiqette’. If you’ve not seen it yet, you’re in for a treat! (It’s also embedded below) We were the biggest club by participation at the Easter Weekend Scottish Athletics Virtual relays. A fun selfie compilation brought a smile to everybody’s face! One of seven photographs is the featured image here, you can see them all on our event write-up, and on the members’ forum. We won the overall title (and seven 1st places in total!) in the Scottish Athletics 15 minute challenge. Here’s our writeup! The ‘bella twist’ was an amazing shoe relay video right across the club, which Laura Henderson did a brilliant job of coordinating. (It’s also embedded below). Many thanks to everybody who took part! Scottish Athletics published the online version of their articles about our 20th anniversary, which you can read here, together with some lovely words by Bryan Burnett about the benefits of being in a running club. Over on our members’ facebook group, Gordon Goldie has been running an amazing series of “Meet the Bella” interviews, which we’re all absolutely loving, finding out so much about our fellow Bellas, and enjoying some pics from our younger years (and one or two fun hairstyle choices!). Oscar continues to run his brilliant three-times weekly Zoom virtual fitness classes. We’re looking to start a club social get together in the next wee while, details will be published soon! Our coaches, led by Gerry Scullion, continue to inspire and motivate our members with regular training schedules, tips and suggestions, over on our Whatsapp announcement group. Don’t forget, we’ve the Scottish Athletics Virtual 1 mile time trial challenge (8th-11th May), as well as our Strava virtual segments in our club championship to take part in (following the currently applicable rules about travel, social distancing etc!) Just to finish on a personal note to encourage you all to be kind to yourself, and do what feels best for you. If you’re inspired to train, that’s fantastic, but like many, I’ve really struggled to find consistency or a routine, so just getting a run done, or achieving a personal goal through the day, is every bit as important and to be celebrated. I’ve resolved to take it day by day, week by week, and really relish the amazing things that I’m […]
💜Congratulations and well done to the whopping 69 Bellas who took part in the Scottish Athletics 15 minute challenge at the end of April.💜 There was a lot of buzz over on the forum, Facebook and strava pages and it was great to see so much encouragement and support given to all our members taking part!!! It’s hard racing against yourself, however that didn’t stop everyone giving it their all…. There were some amazing times recorded across the board! 🙌 A special shout out to our amazing Bella’s 🤩Grant Murphy and Cat MacDonald who covered the furthest individual distance for the club! 👏 💜 But…. Teamwork makes the dream work 💜 and as a result Bellahouston Road Runners scooped 1st place overall for the overall club distance recorded, as well as firsts for Senior Men and Senior Women 🤩 Full details on the Scottish Athletics website: 15-Minute Virtual Challenge brings in over 1100 solo runs With the full result breakdown now available too, we achieved the following ‘podium’ positions: All club members total distance: 1st 🥇 U17 and over total distance: 1st🥇 Senior Men total distance: 1st🥇 Senior Women total distance: 1st🥇 Masters Men (40) total distance: 1st🥇 Masters Women (40) total distance: 1st🥇 Masters Men (45) total distance: 1st🥇 Masters Men (65) total distance: 2nd🥈 Masters Women (55) total distance: 3rd 🥉 With an honourable shout out for 4th in Masters Men (50) total distance too. Well done to everybody who took part, to all the clubs that competed! Just a fantastic success and achievement for every club member to feel proud of! Of course, we didn’t stop there! With huge thanks to Laura Henderson for coordinating, club members got together virtually to create this fantastic video. We hope you enjoy it!