Group Work

When Jesse Arnup-Blondin of Ottawa took up running, she was strictly a soloist (and has the podcast playlist to prove it.) However, Arnup-Blondin admits that after five years of solo running, “I fell into a rut of running the same routes at the same paces. I struggled to really push myself in interval and tempo workouts, never able to hit the times my fitness suggested, and my race times plateaued.” The solution came to her in stages – first through early Saturday morning long runs with other new moms, which doubled as precious social time and helped the kilometres fly by, often at a much faster pace than Arnup-Blondin realized because her group was so occupied swapping ridiculous parenting stories and exploring new routes around the city. Arnup-Blondin credits this group support network for her first Boston qualifier, and has since added weekly speed workouts with the Ottawa Athletic Club Racing Team, a women’s running team that includes recently graduated collegiate runners and accomplished masters athletes. “Each week they help me push myself out of my comfort zone as I chase them around laps of the track or through hilly loops of a local park,” says Arnup-Blondin. “In just a year, I’ve seen my training paces drop, and even when I need to do a workout solo, I now have the confidence to go faster than I previously thought possible. Over the past year, I’ve set personal bests at the 5K (20:33), 10K (42:21) and half-marathon (1:35:25) distances, breaking through barriers even I didn’t expect.”