April is Run Canada Month

April is Run Canada Month

In case you haven’t heard, April is Run Canada Month.  In a nutshell, the purpose of Run Canada Month is to promote running to people of all ages across Canada.  But what exactly does that mean?

I had the opportunity to sit down with Run Canada director Chris Moulton to ask that very question.  He explained the background and how it all came about, as well as the goals of the initiative.

The most obvious and explicit goal is to promote running across Canada, both formally through the Run Canada Races and School programs, as well as informally by inspiring people to give it a try.  In addition, each year, the initiative will include a fundraising project – for 2012, the money raised through donations and purchase of merchandise will go towards the training and support of Canada’s 2012 Olympic marathon team.

The other major goal, however, is to unite the running community.  Running simply doesn’t enjoy the same high profile as other sports (most notably hockey) in Canada, but there is something cool about running that other sports lack.  When I go out to a road race, I could find myself in the same event as Eric Gillis or Dayna Pidhoresky. Sure, I will be much further back in the pack, and they will probably be home and showered by the time I finish, but it’s the same race – and you can’t say that about hockey.

Yet somehow, there is still a great deal of disconnect between elite and recreational runners, and even between different types of running, such as track, cross country, and road running.  While this is changing due to factors such as social media, and the mainstream media coverage of the athletes who have recently qualified for the Olympics, Moulton says we still need to find ways to connect and grow the sense of community among runners.

Moulton is involved in doing just that in the small city of Guelph, Ontario, home of the Speed River Track and Field Club and the Canadian Centre for Running Excellence. Through multiple efforts such as runner’s brunches at a local restaurant, free seminars, and inviting the public out to watch some fast runners run at local meets, Moulton and his colleagues have managed to bring runners together in a very profound way.  The greatest illustration of this sense of community that I can think of is the recent fundraising push for the Guelph Track Project. After receiving a Trillium grant and a very large anonymous donation, the group behind the effort to build an 8-lane international level track found themselves with less than two weeks to come up with another million dollars – and they managed to do it.  Imagine! A million dollars in two weeks, in a city of about 122,000 people. Sure, the elites will use the track for training, but it will also be available to the public, and have the capacity to host major track and field events.  It wouldn’t have been possible to achieve these outcomes if runners and fans continued along in their silos.

So now, Run Canada Month is aiming for something similar at a national level.  “The concept of Run Canada Month started out as Run Canada Week,” Moulton explains, but as they looked at all of the great races available in April, the idea grew to a month-long celebration.  “While there is no way to really measure individual participation in Run Canada Month, we just want to get as many people active and engaged as possible, and bring more people into the running community,” says Moulton.

“You can say what you want about ‘the other guys’ but ultimately the goal of running is the same.  There is a kinship amongst runners no matter who they are,” says Moulton, his passion for the sport bubbling over.  He adds, “Running is a lifestyle sport. You people can come to it at any age, and there’s no retirement.”

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