Many thanks to the many members who joined us for our 2020 AGM, the very first one we’ve ever held virtually. We had at great turnout, and with all our content available to view on our YouTube channel, we’re delighted by the engagement and interest shown by club members into our governance. We hope by being open about our governance process, and outcomes, it’ll even interest and engage more of our members, and even a few potential members. A few of our presentations were pre-recorded, and we are delighted to share these with you here if you wanted to watch them. They’re also embedded below. Club President Richard Leyton’s report and club update is here (and embedded below), which contains a fantastic section with our lead coach Gerry, and Team Manager Leanne looking back over the last year of club training and racing, and gives a real taste of what the club has got up to. The ‘Bella Twists’ highlight reel is here (and embedded below), and we’ve shared it on our public social media – We hope it captures the enthusiasm club members have shown for continuing with club activities, just differently, right through the lockdown. If you like it, do please give it a like or better yet, an onward share. The Financial update from treasurer Kenny Crawford is here. There’s detail too in our Trustees’ Annual Report. If you want to watch the entire AGM(!), you can catch the full live stream recording here. Our previous annual reports are all available via bellahoustonroadrunners.co.uk/charity/ A few key takeaways to report from the motions that were discussed, and voted on: The membership supports, in principle, a change of training venue: As the President’s report detailed, this is something we’d been working on for some time, which will hopefully continue when restrictions allow. The membership, and club, fully endorses and supports the Run Equal campaign. Whilst gender equality in Scottish running events is well ahead of the UK, there are still unequal events (National Masters XC, and some county events as of 2019/20 season). We’ll be making more public statements about that in due course, and to encourage other clubs in Scotland to take a similar stand. Club members supported continuing the membership fee freeze (and longer-term deferral for impacted members), which the Board will keep under review pending a resumption of training/substantive costs. The fees themselves remain unchanged from last year. Members approved three new Honorary Lifetime Members, in Jane Wild, Oscar Wild and Robert McEwan, who have been important members in the development of the club. We’ll be posting a separate news item to welcome them officially as Honorary Lifetime Members. Thanks again to all our members, and we’d encourage them to get in touch with us on any point. Whilst the AGM is an important point in the year, club Governance is a continual process and really depends on members getting involved and helping out where they can: the Board can only do so much. Plus the club is […]
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Huge well done to all our Bellas keeping race sharp during lockdown and embracing last weekends Scottish Athletics virtual distance challenge !!! 💜 It was a hot weekend for racing, but that didn’t stop the 57 Road Runners take on the 15/30 min challenge. We were once again the highest participating club in Scotland!! 👏 and we were 1st overall in the main U17 and Above 15min and 30min Combined distance challenge – a whopping 301.97km! Full results over on the Scottish Athletics website. Of course, we were not just racing this weekend…. As a club, we love keeping in touch virtually through various means during lockdown – a firm favourite seems to be getting in front of a camera 💁🏻♂️🎥🤩 We have joined up with our local rivals Bellahouston Harriers💙 to create the 💜BELLA BATON BONANZA💙 . We also miss seeing our competitors at local running events and thought this would be a great way to link in with them and pass a virtual baton during lockdown Enjoy 💜💙
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.
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!
Club coach Oscar Wild has been hosting lockdown workouts three times every week of the lockdown on the club’s Zoom account. We’re delighted they’re proving popular, and continuing for the foreseeable future! Meeting details are posted to our member’s-only facebook group. Oscar’s regular attendees were keen to find a way to support Oscar’s efforts, and he suggested donations to the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice – a charity close to his heart, and one the club is delighted to have supported at our annual 10k. If you’d like to support the fund raiser, pop over and contribute on the Just Giving page, setup by regular attendee Roz https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/oscarwilde/ Thanks to everybody who has contributed so far, and look forward to seeing you at a forthcoming session!
We celebrated our 20th anniversary back in January, and Scottish Athletics put together a lovely piece to mark the occasion for the early 2020 issue of PB magazine. Delighted to say it’s now available online, and brings back some really happy memories of a great birthday party. Hope you enjoy the piece, and the story of the club over our first two decades, and what we’ve been up to – and hope to get up to in the future! Purple patch now stretches to 20 years . . . Many thanks to Stuart Miller for the article, all at Scottish Athletics, Gordon Goldie for the amazing pictures, and everybody who’s been involved with the club over the years!
BUMPER BELLA TURNOUT AT THE RELAYS Over the Easter weekend, an amazing 68 Bellas participated in the Scottish Athletics Virtual Relays. In true Bella style – a bumper squad got on board and we provided the highest participation level out of all 40 clubs who took part. 68 Bellas ventured out to safe social distancing routes to run impressive times over 5k or 10k and of course rewarded themselves with some guilt free chocolate eggs to celebrate Thanks to everyone for taking part this weekend and huge well done to you all on your performances – it’s not easy racing yourself! Having the virtual support / post race selfies from club members over the the weekend kept everyone going and gave us the racing buzz we all love !! Well done everyone!!! GO BELLA!! We had a lot of fun too coming together virtually too, with members taking a selfie which Laura Henderson turned into these great combos!
Members should now have received our April 2020 Club update via email earlier today. If not, it’s also on our members’ forum. We’re delighted that members across the club are working hard to keep each other motivated, supported and engaged during the lockdown. A few of the things the club and its members have been up to, full details of which are in the update, are: We’ve suspended collection of membership fees for a couple of months. We’re keeping it under review, but if any member is particularly impacted by the situation, we will arrange a longer pause, so do please get in touch. We shared Scottish Athletics’ CEO Mark Munro’s message about how our governing body is being impacted. Do please give it a read, and keep supporting them. We’ve updated our club logo to feature a rainbow! Many of our members have rainbows on display in their windows, so we thought it would be nice for the club should reflect that at this tie. The Board held their first ever virtual board meeting! Oscar has been hosting regular Zoom cross-fit sessions. If you’d like to be get involved, drop us a line (details usually on our facebook group) We’ve our virtual club champ races in three parks in Glasgow for members, and delighted to see members taking it on Scottish Athletics launched their first Virtual Road Relay challenge very recently. We’ve already got loads of members lined up to take part, and plenty of time yet to sign up to a team on the forum. Lots more going on, so do please stay engaged, follow us on social media or subscribe to blog updates, and don’t hesitate to get in touch with ideas or suggestions, or just for a chat. Wishing you all the best, and stay well, Richard, Chair of the Board
We wanted to share something more widely that we recently announced to our club membership, which we hope will help keep them inspired in these strange times. So the COVID-19 situation, cancellation of club training, and the halt to all racing has been a huge blow to us all. The club’s annual club championship has been an important part of our club year since its formation. Whilst clearly not significant in the context of the wider public situation, we do know as runners we enjoy and need challenges, competition, and things to push us to achieve our goals. These were all things the club championship sought to foster, and we thought could continue, in altered form, to help us through this difficult time. So rather than cancelling it entirely – which was a serious possibility as we’ve lost nearly half of this year’s qualifying races, we revised it as (hopefully!) a one-off, to work within the current circumstances and guidelines. We hope in its adjusted form it continues to help motivate members with their running and training, their mental health, and help us all look forward with positivity, and to keep pushing ourselves. The club has created three Strava segments in Glasgow’s parks (the full details are on our members’ forum): a short 5k in Bellahouston park, a 10k at Glasgow Green, and a 10 mile loop in and around Pollok park. Members, of course adhering to all the appropriate guidelines and rules in effect just now, take on the segments as many times as they like, when they like. We’ll then use the best times members achieve for these segments, as qualifying ‘races’ in this year’s championship. We’re hoping there will be enough events left in the year for members to go on to complete the usual criteria to complete this year’s championship, but we’ll be keeping it under review. Our club is already present and popular on Strava, and we’re looking forward to seeing members work their way up the virtual leaderboards as they take on the challenge over the next few weeks. Very best of luck, and we look forward to seeing your attempts on Strava!
Training is cancelled until further notice Due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, and on the recommendation of Scottish Athletics, the club is cancelling all club training sessions until further notice. Naturally, we are very disappointed this has to happen, but we are determined to do our best to help support our membership, and the wider community, through this unprecedented situation. Please contact the club if you have any questions about this: info@bellahoustonroadrunners.co.uk or via social media: Facebook: facebook.com/bellaroadrunner Twitter: @bellaroadrunner Club support For members impacted personally, or financially, by this situation (eg. unable to work or train as a result, forced to self-isolate): the club is keen to support you if it can. We are happy to pause and/or extend memberships for the duration, so you’re not charged or impacted. Please contact us on the club forum, or email membership@bellahoustonroadrunners.co.uk if that would be of help or interest. We also hope the social side of the club can support our members’ mental health and wellbeing at this difficult time: members are encouraged to check you are on our various groups, including Facebook, Strava, Whatsapp, as well as our own members’ forum. Please feel free to join, or kickstart, conversations if you fancy a natter or some ideas or some support. We’d love to hear ideas for more we can do. We are already working on one to help keep members’ training on track and focused, as well as motivated through this situation: we’ll be publishing details soon. Regards, Richard Leyton, Chair, Board of Trustees Bellahouston Road Runners, a charity registered in Scotland (SC047300) Further guidance Further advice for the public is available through NHS Inform: https://www.nhsinform.scot/coronavirus The Scottish Government is also putting out the latest information and advice through social media channels, and on the Scottish Government website: https://www.gov.scot/coronavirus-covid-19/
We’re pleased to publish our 2018-19 Annual Report. We’ve tried to make this year’s report – our second – a celebration of what the club has been up to over the course of the year, as well as including all the details we’re required to include about our policies and finances. It’s available to read here, and we hope you enjoy reviewing it. It covers from August 2018 to July 2019, which is the club’s formal reporting period. Many thanks to everybody at the club who contributed to this year’s report, and looking forward to reporting on the year in progress. All of our required documents, and previous annual report, is also available on our website