Virtual versatility

Emma Parkin celebrates her Virtual Shakespeare Race. This week many many thanks are due to both Matt Burdus-Cook and David Smyth for their superb articles on the very first Virtual Shakespeare Race and David's Virtual Marathon. In this week's newsletter the following quotes appear : "A brilliant idea and another example of how great this sports club is" - Brian Weetman. "The event was a true reflection of the spirit and comradery that exists within our club. This race demonstrates so well that when we pull on our club vest it, whilst it is sometimes about who we are running against, it is always about who we are running with and what we are running for." - Matt Burdus-Cook. "I am a member of a fantastic running club that has some of the most supportive and encouraging members you could wish for." - David Smyth. Do I detect a theme ? Yep. We're part of an exceptional club - but we knew that already didn't we ? Once again, thank you so much Matt and David for your articles. We also have lots of advice and tips to help us through this crisis, courtesy of Paul Bearman and from Paul Hawkins's archives I found some fascinating articles on the early days of the club's triathlon section, as well as a proposal from February 1989 that we have our own track, together with suggested fund raisers. Now, if anyone has any suggestions for virtual haircuts, I for one will be extremely grateful. Make the most of the good weather. Stay fit and healthy and take care. Very Best Wishes David Jones Senior members share details and comments of their Virtual Shakespeare Race runs. April Virtual Shakespeare Race. Report - Matt Burdus-Cook. As we entered lockdown, our ability to meet, train and race as a club suddenly stopped. Whilst this may be a relatively small issue given the backdrop of the reasons why we needed to do this, club activities are an important part of life’s routine for many of us. Club brings us together socially, supports our physical and mental wellbeing and gives us an avenue to pursue our passion for something that only runners really understand. And so talk began of how we could do something to allow club members to spend some time focusing on a silver lining in these cloudy times by creating a virtual club race. E-mail trails ensued. The agreed race format was for athletes to select their own 10k route which they would run at a time to suit in a 2 week period and post their results online for collation. The distance raced was as close as athletes could run to 10K and was then adjusted if needed to ensure that everyone had a comparable time for exactly 10k. We did discuss if we could adjust times to account for the hilliness of race routes run. This is complicated to do without an accepted methodology and if we adjusted for hills, then why not…