Carroll puts passion for running into Valentine Run
AMHERST — Volunteering has always come easy to Shelley Carroll.
As her children grew up and joined minor sports and other community organizations, the 47-year-old Amherst resident answered the call. Now that they’ve grown, she continues to pour her efforts into one of her passions in life — running.
Carroll, who works with Correctional Service of Canada, has been an active participant in the Amherst Striders Running Club almost from its inception. That support grew from being a member to helping with its running events including the Valentine Run — an event that has provided several thousands of dollars in support of various community organizations.
“Volunteering is something you do in the community and something every community needs,” Carroll said of her work with the Amherst Striders and other community organizations. “It’s something I’ve enjoyed being a part of. We are lucky in town we have so many volunteers and so many people working behind the scenes to make things happen.”
Carroll is in awe at what the Striders have meant to the running community and how the organization brought everyone together to share their favourite pastime.
“A lot of people were doing their own thing, or were running with the YMCA, but they weren’t running together,” she said. “When Ken MacKenzie, Alan Theal and Peter Nixon got together they created a home base for everyone to get together and it went from there.”
Carroll was out for a run one day in 2012 when Nixon stopped her and told her to go on Facebook and look for the Amherst Striders.
“At the time I had been living here for 10 years and didn’t know a running community existed,” she said. “When I found the Striders I found a group of people from all walks of life. I ended up finding a lot of great friends through the Striders. I really wasn’t connected to anything before, but then you start meeting up with the same people three times a week and you pass the time talking to them on the road. You get to know them and you find out you have more in common than running.”
She said the Striders are like family. The stronger, faster runners often circle back to support the slower or newer members. The runners also motivate each other as well as those in training for events such as marathons, half-marathons and ultra-marathons.
“We push each other to be better and the support is there,” she said.
When she qualified for the Boston Marathon in 2013, Dr. Rick McKinney and Dr. Rachna Minocha-McKenney helped rally the community behind her participation. When she returned she wanted to give back to the community. From that, the Valentine run got its start with funding supporting young people.
“It was really a group effort and it’s something that the children have benefitted from,” she said. “I am happy to have been a part of it and to see what it had done is so rewarding. I am happy to be giving something back and to be involved in something local.”
She’s already looking ahead to the next Valentine Run, although with COVID-19 she’s unsure what format will it take and whether it will be an actual run or a virtual one — something many running events have become in these days of social distancing.
Carroll said she started running about 15 years to see if she could do it. While she never was a distance runner before, she caught the bug quickly. She set realistic goals and saw huge improvement.
It wasn’t long before she began qualifying for major events such as the Boston Marathon.
Besides her work with the Striders, Carroll was active in taekwondo and basketball groups when her son Chris was coming through the system. She was also supportive of her son Kyle’s participation in minor hockey and basketball.
Her efforts didn’t go unrecognized as she was Amherst’s representative volunteer in 2019.
She doesn’t see herself slowing down because as the COVID-19 lockdown showed here, there are only so many books to read and so much Netflix to watch.